I like that his relationship with Lucy has been forcing Walky to actually think about the more fucked-up aspects of Christianity, rather than just making fun of Joyce whenever she says anything because everyone already knows they dislike each other.
I don’t know. I mean the song is wayyyy creepy and to be honest pretty much every major religion feels a little culty, but I don’t think the Indiana State University’s local church engages in the kind of coercive tactics to maintain and/or expand leadership that would define a cult. Even if they wanted to, I think board might have something to say about that once outcry led to them loosing salary bonuses.
Well, the rhetoric of religious and political cults alike is used by a lot more than just cults themselves precisely *because* it’s designed by cult leaders to proliferate beyond their groups. It’s meant to be unwittingly picked up and spread by ordinary people to legitimize cult ideologies, make said ideologies more palatable to those in America’s religious and political mainstream, and eventually recruit them.
It’s precisely because Christian/conservative cults are so effective at this that their techniques are used by a lot more than just the cults — they are small but disproportionately influential groups in the religious red state in which the comic is set.
A lot of that also has to do with Reagan trying to tie the Republican party to the white religious right as a political ploy. He brought in that cult mentality on purpose.
Indeed it is! Discovered that during swing dance with some undergrads. For me it was the smallest town I’d lived in by a couple orders of magnitude, for her it was the biggest, also by a couple orders…
It’s United Methodist. That’s a mainline denomination, it’s a LGBTQ friendly congregation.
Probably a good idea to not confuse the real life United Methodist church in Bloomington with the one in the Dumbiverse, for privacy sake at a bare minimum. Also the UMC is apparently schisming right now.
I don’t want to spam with a link, but to cut and paste from the first Google hit for “UMC schism”, the gist of it seems to be that the denomination may vote in 2024 to rescind their stance banning gay marriage and gay ordained individuals, but in the meantime 1/5 of their churches have de-affiliated (over it? On both sides of the argument?) since 2019.
> More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.
> Those figures emerge following the close of regular meetings in June for the denomination’s regional bodies, known as annual conferences. The departures began with a trickle in 2019 — when the church created a four-year window of opportunity for U.S. congregations to depart over LGBTQ-related issues — and cascaded to its highest level this year.
> Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.
Thanks!
That first bit sounds really great. If i’d still be a believer, this is what i’d advocate for. I like that they phrase it as “LGBTQ+ persons are a good expression of God’s diverse creation”. This makes sense theologically.
I’m not a believer anymore because there’s so many other red flags, but i see myself as an ally of everyone who’s faith runs along those lines 🙂
“Believe what we tell you to, or when you die our god will torture you in a lake it make out of fire for the rest of eternity.”
That’s all of christianity. It’s not a nice cult.
I mean, not necessarily. There are Christian denominations which specifically teach that Jesus saved all sinners from Hell by dying on the cross, regardless of whether they believe or not.
Of course, even then there’s usually an assumption (unspoken or otherwise) that all humanity would be going to Hell if not for Jesus’ intervention— and, more chillingly, that every single one of them would deserve it— so yeah, still at least somewhat culty.
Recent occurrences in some evangelical congregations seem to indicate that Jesus is no longer the primary focus. One pastor stated that after he preached on the Sermon on the Mount, some in the church wanted to know where he got that sissified nonsense. When explained that those were Jesus’s words, the congregant was dismissive, claiming that such liberal garbage wouldn’t work these days.
There are several different views on Hell out there, but a large portion of Christian theologians today, even evangelical ones, don’t buy into the active torture version. Generally, Hell is defined as being separate from God. So, more like God not forcing people to spend eternity in God’s presence if they’re not a fan of God. I think most folks like a *little bit* of punishment in their view of Hell, because obviously Hitler and other nasty people (nasty in history or just nasty in your own life, like an abusive partner or something) deserve some punishment, but a lot of views of Hell focus a lot less on the punishment and more on the just “it actually sucks being separate from God.” Several versions, as mentioned above, involve Jesus’s death saving everyone or even people getting to change their minds after they decide Hell sucks. It’s still obviously an uncomfortable point of the Christian faith for a lot of folks, but there’s a lot more nuance to the actual theological study around it than just “burn forever, everybody who isn’t us”
1. Indiana State University is another institution, in Terre Haute.
2. IU is surrounded by churches. You can probably find just about any kind you’re looking for.
3. That song is creepy? You haven’t heard creepy!
There’s only one difference between a cult and a religion, and it’s the size of the organization. If Christianity only had 50 members, it would be called a cult. And that’s the only reason Scientology is called a religion as well.
my opinion of this is that it became a cult for Walky when he realized that Becky (who was absolutely raised in a cult, that has an ACTUAL BODY COUNT now) was so familiar with the tune.
Considering how much he ragged on Joyce over it before, i’m surprised it wasn’t more common knowledge to him but i guess you have to be there to realize it
makes me wonder if lucy would be ‘thirsty’ enough to abandon her religion for walky lol (tho i’ve heard the opposite is more common where christian girls are ‘seduced’ by some playboys or whatever)
tho i don’t think lucy would be as ‘far gone’ as joyce was (who is an atheist now so yeah), since i think her paretns were prolly more normal/stable about it, liek at one point i think lucy did like Harry Potter (tho not that it’s aged well), or at least had enough knowledge to ask Jen what her “hogswarts house” is, and i def believe a handful of christian parents would never have let their children read/watch harry potter
Seems equally likely that Joyce being so extreme is what prompted her eventual atheist transition, and Lucy, being much more mainstream to begin with, would find it harder to abandon religion altogether. Her beliefs being much more accepting make them, in turn, easier to accept (and thus harder to reject).
The beliefs themselves are often a major factor. “Either everything in the Bible literally happened (as we interpret it), or all of it is lies and God does not exist” does not hold up well to experiencing the real world.
Hence the “Evangelical Bubble” that Joyce grew up in, where anything that conflicts with their “worldview” (such as actually meeting someone with different beliefs) is strenuously avoided.
“Seduced” hell, every one is different. I’ve known girls who were quite willing to throw down with the right dude regardless of how they worshipped. (and no, they didn’t throw down with ME, either.)
It only takes a little rationalization to get Lucy in bed with Walky, no matter what she believes.
Yeah, “Will the Christian girl abandon her faith to sleep with an atheist, since those are the only choices?” is a bit weird when Becky is right there on panel.
Walky’s smart enough not to have assumed Joyce’s fundie upbringing is what the whole of Christianity is like. Now he’s wondering if maybe he should have.
Maybe she’d be willing to compromise with Walky on a church with a different emphasis that averages distance from their comfort zones. The denomination I grew up in focuses much more on gratitude and engaging with the community.
Lol, this reminded me of when I learned about the Gnostic Order of the Serpent or whatever they were called, a heretical order in Europe wiped out in the 13th(?) century. They interpreted the whole “Jesus died for our sins” thing as encouragement to sin, so long as they properly repented afterward. The basic idea being that because Jesus died for your sins, if you don’t sin, then Jesus died for nothing, so it’s better to sin, confess, and repent than to avoid sin entirely as that would undermine Jesus’ sacrifice. IIRC they focused mostly on lust and gluttony, having regular feasts and orgies where they’d indulge heavily in sins of the flesh, and then they’d all crowd into confessional the next day to confess their sins and be told how to repent for them, then they’d serve their penance, and do it all over again next week. Honestly my favorite sect of Christianity and I really wish they could have somehow survived to this day.
I don’t know, this one would probably get pretty low cult scores in BITE theory. Not discouraging contact with non-cult members or discrediting alternate sources of information, not punishing members for leaving, guess we’ll have to see how much they push the collection plate in your face but it doesn’t look like they’re trying to take all the money they can from members. . .
I mean, early on in the recruitment phase, manipulation of behavior, information, etc. aint really that apparent from the get-go, and that’s by design. What goes on first is the *mental prep* as it were that will support the former and insulate it from criticism once inculcated to members on a case-by-case basis.
This is all very unfamilar to me. Is that like a play on ennui, or is there more of a religious thing as illustrated by the comic itself? And please accept my apologies for asking if this is more than folks are willing to delve into.
All good. No, it’s just a sexual innuendo. The song is about being lost in the spirit of God. However, Lucy wants Walky to be “in her” in a sexual way. Also, the alt-text uses xenoglossia (“speaking in tongues,” or sudden unplanned speech in an unknown language) as a euphemism for sexual things people could do with tongues.
“Ennui” would be pronounced differently: “Ahn-WEE” not “In you”.
i feel like any at least somewhat (non-terrible) christian who has at least a bit of self awareness would respond with “i know, right?” That would’ve been my response (then again, my use of past tense there might kinda disqualify me as an example)
Lucy’s not known for her nuanced takes or ability to honestly take a second look at her assumptions. She’s busy writing a script in her head about her future fancy church wedding and all the relatives and hundreds of friends telling her how wonderful she is. She will not react well if Walky honestly shares his impressions.
well becky is more of the ‘expert’ and it’d be easier to ask someone who’s gay/someone considered to have aspects that wouldn’t be ‘accepted’ by strict religious ppl yet she also still decides to believe
that said, would Walkys mom respect her more or less if he was like “Yeah, she’s a good christian sheep brainwashed by their cult” (i mean i doubt he’d phrase it that exact way to his mom but still)
Honestly in my experience it probably rates in the bottom third? Definitely the bottom half. (Just judging by the lyrics we see in the comic, I haven’t had the displeasure of hearing this particular one.)
seriously though, it’s basically just a big sleepover. i got invited to a few by christian friends when i was younger. the church in question was one of those converted auditoriums, so they still had basketball hoops and gym equipment to play with, a pile of beanbag chairs, we watched (christian) movies and had popcorn. idk, it seemed pretty standard to me.
Yeah, the “lock-in” part sounds sketchy if you’re looking for reasons to hate it, but it really just means “we will not let your children wander off alone into the night”. Thinking about it they were probably actually more concerned with people wandering off in pairs, but either way the wording makes it sound way more subversive than it actually is.
We had something like that for my HS graduation party. It was at the YM/YWCA (they shared a building). You could use the pool, the gym, the game room, the basketball and racquetball courts all night. The doors were locked so people who weren’t a part of the graduating class could crash the party, or party-goers couldn’t go out and then sneak booze back in (remember this was back in 1972 when 18-year-olds in my state could legally buy and drink beer and hard liquor). If you wanted to go home early you could, but with the knowledge that once you were outside that was it, you weren’t getting back in.
That’s what it was, but of course there was also singing. And watching a bunch of teenagers sing “worship” songs with their hands raised and heads tilted up to the ceiling with looks of ecstasy on their faces was creepy as all ****. Even at 14 and desperate for people to like me, I was like, “I’m out, thanks.”
The lock-ins I went to were mostly at arcades or bowling alleys or the like. They were actually pretty fun! And that was even at a pretty conservative church. Eventually got banned from that church because they thought I was a “bad influence” aka gay/emo kid.
I mean, I am gay but it’s not like I knew that at the time.
And as others have noted, secular versions exist, usually in other forms of community orgs and youth groups. Honestly, this whole comment section has been pretty full of knee-jerk reactions to fairly mundane things. Even the song lyrics (that we see) don’t really strike me as all that ‘culty’–if you believe in God (I don’t), and that that God is both benevolent and omnipotent, then the above lyrics pretty much make sense. I see no condemnations of non-believers, not even any of the lyrics like “I would die for you” or “Everything good in me comes from you” that we’ve seen earlier.
I mean, I get it–organized religion in general has a lot to answer for. But describing all such groups as ‘cults’ is pretty much making sure no one outside of specific atheist circles will even take you seriously.
It’s probably relevant that Walky is just uncomfortable with the song initially. He’s wary. It’s not until Becky tells him that she thinks the song is normal/common that he concludes it’s seriously messed-up.
For all his joking, Walky actually does have a very clear set of opinions on Joyce’s childhood that he pretends are just lighthearted jabs.
Avoiding the word is a privilege and power thing, like how when poor people behave the same way they’re antisocial lunatics, but when rich people behave the same way they’re just eccentric. This says less about whether the religion qualifies for the word in any objective sense, and more about whether it qualifies as something we fear retribution from if its leadership or sycophants should they hear us badmouthing it.
I’m not sure of the distinction between “classical” and “modern” sense you’re drawing here. As far as I can tell the use of cult to refer to any mainstream religion is very modern – and appears mostly among atheists looking for a way to bash religion in general.
In the classical sense, ancient religions are often referred to as cults (“temple cult”, “cultic practices”), but that lacks any real connection to the modern negative sense of the term. The definitions are objectively different and have nothing to do with the power of the religion or fear of retribution.
“Cult is a term, in most contexts pejorative, for a relatively small group which is typically led by a charismatic and self-appointed leader, who excessively controls its members, requiring unwavering devotion to a set of beliefs and practices which are considered deviant (outside the norms of society). This term is also used for a new religious movement or other social group which is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals, or its common interest in a particular person, object, or goal.”
“An older sense of the word involves a set of religious devotional practices that is conventional within its culture, is related to a particular figure, and is frequently associated with a particular place.”
While power isn’t strictly a factor for either definition, the mainstream status that causes Christianity to escape the more modern, more pejorative definition is a form of power.
That probably needs amending to include beliefs and practices that a society considers the norm. “Cult” in the newer, concerning sense refers to a manipulative, controlling group, which is usually but not always small and usually but not always has beliefs considered abnormal. It’s the manipulation and control that matter- a cult that centers around growing crops to give to your community is still a cult if they’re real fucked up about getting you to do it.
My read is that it’s basically two uses – both used pejoratively: One the group with the charismatic, controlling leader, the other the basically harmless but weird group.
It’s really hard to say Christianity (or any of the major denominations) are “led by a charismatic and self-appointed leader”. “excessive control” is obviously a subjective idea, but the level of control in a Catholic or mainline Protestant church is far from what goes in what we normally think of as cults.
There are certainly some, often fundamentalist, churches that do reasonably fall into that category.
But you really need to stretch it to include most mainstream religions.
If Christianity is nominally being led by Jesus/God, then it’s not at all hard to say Christianity is led by a charismatic, self-appointed leader.
Granted, I don’t think Jesus IS presently in a leadership position, but a large chunk of believers acknowledge him as being at the head of Christianity. More to the point, relevant to this particular comic strip, the hymn lyrics frame things that way and that’s shaping Walky’s present take on the religion.
In absurd supernatural beliefs, there is little objective difference between ‘cults’ and ‘religions’. Between the “an archangel talked to me” of Islam vs Mormonism or some weird new church with 50 adherents, or the invisible entities of medieval angels/demons and Scientology thetans. Transubstantiation and the Virgin Mary and the Trinity, among other things, are absurd, but are hallowed by the weight of 2000 years of cultural dominance.
In the BITE model… mainstream US churches _right now_ might score pretty low, but my father grew up in a 1940s Boston Catholicism that would probably score pretty high. And levels of Behavior Control that might seem cultish for Christianity are just normal for Judaism or Islam.
Sure, the supernatural beliefs are equally absurd and in that sense there’s an equivalence.
But I’d look closer at the BITE model. Obviously mainstream churches will vary, but even 40s Catholicism is low compared to the dangerous cults it’s intended to measure.
And “Judaism” is cultish? Seriously? If you’re just thinking of the Hasidim, I can see the case, but they’re a tiny minority of Jews.
I called out Behavior specifically from BITE, not the whole thing. There’s a _lot_ of rules about behavior in standard orthodox Judaism. Kosher rules, most obviously, with the effect of making it harder to socialize with people outside the religion. Sabbath rules. Daily prayers. Don’t marry non-Jews…
I realized later that medieval Catholicism, if not modern, was higher than I remembered, too. So many fast days, Lent… You wouldn’t have the social isolation effect when everyone was Catholic, though.
Walky I know it’s been a while since you’ve been to church but…You don’t remember the after Praise and Worship orgy? Why the hell do you think anyone gets up at 8 am on a Sunday? Of Course it’s for the ORGY.
that’d def paint the ‘family/relatives dragging you to organized religion’ into context even worse
that early in the day even for sex doesn’t seem worth it, but religious stuff aside i suppose getting it out of the wya and being productive the rest of the day would be nice depending on you/your partners preferences
or ppl having ‘sex breaks’ during lunch or ‘nooners” or whatever XD
Obviously there’s separate rooms so everyone in the family can stay separated. And y’know. A room in the back where kids can play video games with EXCELLENT sound proofing.
Here they are. Most of ’em, anyway. The ones I could find. Multiply blending layers with the actual colors picked directly from the comic, flat on top of your pictures.
Nice to see how much you’ve grown as an artist! There are some really nice/cute drawings in there.
I’m a bit bothered by your focus on Carla’s nether regions. It’s the polar opposite of Willis’ approach that states Carla’s exact configuration is None Of Your Business.
Haha I get that. I’m trying to do it less.
That said it’s mostly cuz I find it unique and interesting and I’m drawn to features that make particular characters “unique” from the others. (IE. Most of my Billie drawings are boob focused) Also I just enjoy drawing certain kinds of nether regions more than others while I’m attracted to certain genders more than others
They’ve always read as christmas and easter catholics to me, Walky in particular is a pretty good portrayal of a lapsed catholic, I suspect Linda would have been equally happy to ship Sal off to a military school if the judge had suggested it.
Holiday religious is the term I sometimes use. People who identify as a member of a religion, but only go to services maybe three or four times a year on holidays, and feel that things like weddings and funerals need to be in their faith’s place of worship.
there’s prolly not a lot of ‘alternate’ places that’d taken in a ‘troubled teen’ that would’ve been sent to juvie otherwise lol. Or maybe house arrest but that prolly would’ve been worse for sal
Prolly is a legitimate dialectic difference in pronunciation in spoken English, which, as many things, has been transliterated to written English and used as a tone indicator. Prolly, along with other shorteners like “ur” or “kk” indicates a casual tone from the speaker.
In the same way that not using contractions indicates emphasis or thoughtful/careful speech (see Dina), or dropping the g on -ing words indicates casual tones (both Becky and Walky in this exact comic) in verbal speech. Communicating tone and personality in text is just as important as in speech, and the specific words and spellings people use to do so is the main way to do so.
Walky had a line a while ago that was something like once Sal was at Catholic school, Linda thought that was the whole religion thing covered. He was obviously being flippant, but the point about how religious the family was in general seemed genuine.
Walky’s thought bubble is black and white instead of in color. I think there’s been another like that recently. I kind of liked them in color, it made it more obvious it wasn’t spoken out loud.
Is this a typical Protestant hymn? Or just among the more evangelical-ish branches of Christianity that aren’t Catholic? What makes it especially worrisome? Is it about God being “in me”?
It’s not a hymn I’m personally familiar with, and looking it up it does seem to be a fairly recent (1980’s) non-denominational song, so yeah, more likely something you’d see in an evangelical service than a mainline Protestant church. That being said, it’s not particularly out there as far as the theme of hymns go.
There is definitely a theme of submission to God in a lot of Christian music. Part of this can sort of be accounted for the fact that theology would imply that God should be a source of strength and guidance for us in our darkest hours, that he might be trusted to show us the right way to do things. However there is a difference between the empowering aspects of devotion and the surrendering aspects of devotion. God giving us guidance that we might be able to make the right decision is different from trusting that God will take care of all of our problems, and the latter can get messy if certain people can encourage others to see them as a proxy for God in those circumstances. When we trust a church to help us know what God wants from us, we end up trusting that church to make our decisions for us.
And of course, from an outsider’s perspectives, there can be something troubling about the encompassing submission that is implied in devotion. Walky sees a cult because he sees people singing about giving themselves fully over to God, and yeah, generally speaking whenever you see a crowd of people chanting that they’ll give themselves fully over to a single guy, the natural inclination is to start looking out for koolaid. Sometimes that get obscured under all the tradition.
I would like to make a futile attempt to rescue a word from corruption, by saying that as a mainline Protestant I take exception to using “evangelical” to mean “in-your-face, turn or burn” as opposed to the obvious meaning of “euangelion”: “good news”.
I heard it in evangelical churches when I was younger. There’s a lot of songs in those types of churches about how basically you can do nothing on your own, you’re worthless and messed up by sin and everything good about you isn’t because of you it’s because of god. But of course all your mistakes are yours, not gods.
As a brit I found this hymn pretty wild to read. We don’t really sing stuff like that here (as far I know). It is very “god is everything, without god I suck”. Here it’s like “isn’t nature nice, thanks god” (as far as I know, British ppl tend to be more culturally Christian than religious per se).
Nope, sorry Walky. That’s normal christianity and normal christian worship music (yes it’s f***ed up, but so is Christianity).
Whether or not she’s in a cult has to do with how much power the group and its leaders have over her. You may find the B.I.T.E. model useful for evaluating that.
well, she seems to be a bit more well adjusted than joyce, so i’m assuming if she decided to be agnostic or full on atheist i’d think her parents would accept it (tho be a hilarious plot twist if it was literally only her as the ‘religious’ person in the family
but i suppose religious differences would be a valid reason as any to have a breakup
I don’t think Walky legitimately thinks she’s in a cult. He’s overstating because he’s concerned by some of the lyrics. Although…. “That’s normal Christianity” and “that’s a cult” are not mutually exclusive.
Reminds me of the time I went to church and they were singing a song about how they wanted to feel Jesus inside them. It was one of those mega churches and that line was sandwiched between two other equally dirty sounding ones and I started laughing in the middle of trying to sing, causing more than a few angry glares. Then the church announced that every household had to pay $500 (minimum, more members meant more money) and I immediately nope’d out. My ex was livid, but I can recognize a cult when I see one!
This is definitely not great for Walky and Lucy though. She’s not exactly like Joyce, I can’t see her going through a “losing/cooling my faith” story. And likewise, I can’t see him *not* being bothered by this (meaning his personality doesn’t strike me as the sort that wouldn’t constantly make little comments about her beliefs that eventually wear her down even if it’s unintentional). It’s one of those foundational issues; if you have certain personalities you can make it work, but more often than not it becomes a game of “death by one thousand cuts.”
Could be wrong though. My husband and I managed to make it work by being respectful of each others beliefs (until I lost mine, that is), and Walky seems determined to do things “right”. This is another issue which can be solved by simple communication, which maybe he’ll do in the next few strips. I’m just really worried this will be another thing he throws in the pressure cooker of his brain to not bring up until the worst possible moment. Like, other than the fact that she likes comics and games like him, it kinda feels like he dislikes most things about her from her religious beliefs to her always-on attitude to how she wants to be more physically intimate sooner than he’s ready for. And like, not that I’d expect him to be chill about religion (he’s never shown an interest in it before), it’s just that… these lyrics aren’t that bad. Nothing extreme about it other than it probably sounding awful musically. If these lyrics are freaking him out, he ain’t gonna make it through the “this is literally the body and blood of Christ” part. Idk if most Protestant denominations believe it literally is, but it threw me for a hard loop when I found out that my Orthodox relatives believe it literally turns into flesh and blood after you eat it.
TL;DR, my prediction for the next few strips: “Oh no!”
Gonna add here that I don’t know which song this one is, so I’m only going off of the lyrics in the comic. I actively avoided gospel music even as a Christian, it is literally the worst-sounding genre in the world to my ears.
All that with your ex-husband sounds awful, I’m really sorry.
PS. I was also a little shocked when I learned about transubstantiation – my church always seemed treat that part Jesus’s speech at the last super as metaphor and the communion as a ritual for the sake of remembrance. It was just really mouth-watering delicious bread and a quantity of grape juice too small to quench one’s thirst. I don’t think I’d want to cannibalize Jesus.
Thankfully he was only my ex-boyfriend, my husband is my only one (and hopefully it will continue that way!)
I suspect I was a bit like Walky’s family was, if they identify as Christians. My mother occasionally took us to church but without any schedule (she left it up to me as a child, which meant we didn’t go because I woke up before 7 am for nobody but school). I was a Christian for 22 years, I was baptized, but I never once took communion. I didn’t even know Protestants did communion until reading this comic. I had to call a relative like “WAIT ALL SECTS DO COMMUNION?! SINCE WHEN????” So I had *heard* of transubstantiation but I always reasoned it was a form of sympathetic magic, not literal.
The Episcopal Church is a Protestant church that split off from Rome when the Pope on the behest of the King of Spain wouldn’t grant Henry VIII a divorce so he could remarry and thus hopefully have a son and thus uncontested heir. Some parishes do communion once a month. Some do it 2x a month. Some do it every Sunday.
The knots that theologians twist themselves into over this detail is something I find hilarious, personally. They feel so compelled to be utterly literalist about it and do not know how to deal with the consequences. You did this to yourselves, guys.
FWIW I’m pretty sure transubstantiation is a catholic/orthodox theology that most if not all protestant denominations discarded, that’s definitely been my experience.
I had a similar experience when my grandparents dragged me to church for Christmas and the priest mentioned in passing that Maria was 12 when giving birth… I was just sitting there like D: for a while. Like, even if you believe the whole thing, how is your reaction to worship that God?
Uh, food does turn into flesh and blood after you eat it. Does that help any?
Musically this one is not so bad. There are recent songs that show a real talent for amusicality, seemingly assembled at random from a Universal Religious Buzz Phrase Generator, hammered onto tunes that don’t fit the words and would stumble even without them.
Rich Mullins, who Joyce has mentioned several times over the years, wrote a tune called “Awesome God.” The chorus includes the line “Our God is an awesome god.”
I mostly associate that song with a guy called Kenny from a video game called The Walking Dead. If you don’t know why, look up “Kenny Awesome God” and you’ll probably find out.
It’s interesting as in many ways it’s about culture and tradition. Like I had a friend who wouldn’t allow “religious items” in the house but that include my penguin Xmas ornaments that were an allusion to the 3 wise men (literally penguins in cracker hats).
A lot of art and culture is heavily influenced by religion. And I think that can be cool, interesting and beautiful. I also think culturally religion often provides the baseline for social morals (like its usually how kids learn about morality as a concept to start with).
So yes I think too often organised religion is too authoritarian and doesn’t allow discussion or different interpretations, but that’s not always true. And it’s so foundational to many cultures where individuals do have different interpretations or follow traditions becuase they simply like them that to say religion = cult is too simplistic.
I mean…I dunno. I’m fine with people finding hope, meaning, inspiration and purpose in their religion. If they truly believe their life, hope and strength are in God then more power to ’em. A lotta people find comfort in believing that there’s a higher power and that adoration drives them through their day to day life and I feel like just because I don’t believe in that doesn’t give me the right to criticize that. If “It’s all part of god’s plan” helps you cope with loss or misfortune, I envy that.
I don’t generally, but lines like that are disconcerting to me and it would be regardless of what they were talking about. Especially since they’re probably making kids sing it.
yeah i def see the appeal of having religion as a ‘comfort/strength’ as opposed to “i shall pray for a hundred million bucks and not work toward it at all” as a way (tho i think one podcaste ri listened to joked about growing up catholic and saying something liek “it’s all good i’ll just ask god to forgive me before i die”
as long as they aren’t using a religious excuse to hurt someone, just let ppl believe what they want, even if ppl have valid reasons to criticize, it would be kinda a dick move to just go into a church and yell hail satan loudly (tho i wonder how many like 11 year olds have tried doing that to get out of going to church XD [i mean, picking fights is shitty to begin with but it’s kinda interesting how those same ppl only seem to be anti christian and don’t also tell like a woman wearing a hijab to remove it, not that they should either way but i wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s an asshole to everyone about it no matter how ‘deep’ their belief is])
The topic of religion in itself is complicated and difficult, mainly about “saviors” who know that many people go through bitter times and seek comfort and help and take advantage of it, giving a promise of something better for something in return.
It is from that that many people see religions as something harmful, but I dare say it, you can find something wise and redeemable in the Bible, for example.
Some of that making them feel better depends on making them feel like shit first. Some pretty messed up stuff follows from “it’s all part of [god(s)]’s plan”, and it’s everyone’s right to criticize that.
I know as long as there’s humans, a lot of them will be religious. A mix of somewhat comforting ——, neutral silliness, and harmful in each of them, effecting people’s choices large and small. Religions aren’t the only beliefs and practices that do those things. It’s mostly fine, are at least mostly something I accept it’s not worth trying to change. But when it’s harmful, exercise your right to criticize it.
Why is it their right to share what they find comforting, but I find cruel, but not my right to share why I find comforting and they find unsettling?
We made him sound like more of a c-word so we could make him sound like less of one for not letting you go to the place that he was a c-word for making in the first place.
It’s not just Christianity. For example, thinking that bad things happen to Dalits because they deserve it comes from the same type of reasoning as “it’s part of [gods]’ plan”.
In a sense, very much yeah. One of Christianity’s big innovations was the idea of a canonical doctrine agreed upon regardless of geography. It wasn’t successful, but they put a lot of effort during multiple periods of its history into enforcing it. Which, of course, also made it incredibly inflexible when it spread to other places.
But cultures shouldn’t be inflexible, and they shouldn’t be universal.
and tax free, surprised more ppl aren’t making up organizations to get a break or so
i’d expect to see more ppl demand to see miracles as proof, but be amusing of ‘modern demons’ existed but i imagine they’d mess with ppl more than help
Speaking as a rather shaky materialist with undefined pagan/animist leanings, I’m going to say I don’t fucks with this take. It’s not “religion” or “organized religion” or whatever other pretty term you wanna use. The problem is Christianity. This goes beyond theological issues (not a fan of how much genocide plays a foundational role in the mythology, such as the battle of Jericho, nor am I thrilled with how much the belief system hinges on the apocalypse theology in Revelations, this latter element IMO having formed the basis for a lot of the more fucked up shit done in Christ’s name) and into the cultural aspects of it. Imperialism and colonialism are baked into Christianity. “Spreading the Good News” is considered a major tenet of the faith, and that’s served as a basis for everything from forced conversions to slavery.
Do other belief systems, especially the big ones, have some fucked up elements? Indeed they do. But Christianity began life as an apocalypse cult that believed the end of the world was imminent. Add to that Roman Imperial doctrine and you have a recipe for a fast-spreading belief system that has no tolerance for competitors, especially the much older pagan beliefs that it (in many cases violently) replaces.
“Christianity is uniquely bad” is some ‘noble savage’ BS. You might not want to use the terms “religion” or “organized religion”, but don’t tell other people they don’t want to.
don’t tell people what they fucking “wanna” say. if someone is criticizing all religion, that’s what they’re doing. if you want to get all “noble savage” then that’s what you can do yourself. if you want to play obtuse, do that too.
Jesus you really misread the entirety of my comment. I don’t even know where you got “noble savage” from — I notice you haven’t bothered to explain that one yet either.
Actually no, I’m not gonna sit around waiting for you to explain. I really shouldn’t engage with you anymore, since you’re hella mad about hella nothing, but let’s set the record straight
A) you seem to think that I’m somehow trying to force people to use or not use certain words, and I am not, you seem to have (deliberately?) misread the meaning of what I said, when I said “it’s not “religion” or “organized religion”” I wasn’t saying they weren’t allowed to use those words, I was saying that the target of their ire is misplaced
2) “if someone is criticising all religion, that’s what they’re doing” — oh my god no shit? I was disagreeing with them
D) “noble savage” is a racist trope about indigenous people and I have zero idea what that has to do with anything in this thread
Yeah, I’ve been in Walkys shoes.
Went to my friend’s church when I was a kid cause his dad made him go, so I tagged along to keep him company, and was strongly turned off by the messaging. It always boiled down to some variation of God loves you as a long as you do what he wants.
And I couldn’t stomach that sort of conditional love.
god sure is petty lol. tho given how the bible was ‘written by’ humans i’m surprised they didn’t sneak in a way to be like “don’t question the priests/church leaders” or so, to where ppl are even more under their control
I mean there is the pope but i wonder how many ppl do put him on the same amount of reverence as jesus lol (tho honestly my first thought is ‘popemobile’ and ‘matpat giving the pope undertale’ lol)
🙂 don’t question the priests? what about the high priest making a golden calf and a few days latter killing 1300 people for the sin of worshiping the very same golden calf. Also, the whole tribe that did the killings became the clergy from then on. And the golden calf’s high priest got the blessings from the prophet. Also a few years latter some among the clergy tribe complained that the sons of the high priest were getting too big a cut of the meats and offerings and… got burned to death and their families were “swallowed by the earth… Yeah… go question this church leaders… and if you happen to die the next day by the hand of you know who, its just because of your wicked sins or the sins of your grandfather or his grandfather…or his grandfather’s grandfather… because you know… fear of god is the beginnig of wisdom and all that jazz. So be fearful, be very very fearful… of the hands of god…
tbf the fun orgy kind prolly has some dark undertones to them too ,if not hte ‘leader’ just scamming their money (in which case be bettr to go off to a brothel)
I was looking in my memory for a cult in which orgies are not reserved only for the leader and perhaps the narrowest circle of priests.
Maybe a hippie commune?
There is no “fun orgy kind” of cult. Cults are defined by their overly controlling structure. People doing fun orgy stuff together without being manipulated into staying in the group and following the group’s rules would, by definition, not be a cult. That’s just people doing stuff.
Yeah, I wasn’t going to call that out, since it’s a throwaway line, but orgy + cult = sexual abuse in my mind (and generally reality).
Funny how many cults that pop up turn into the male leader needing to have multiple female sexual partners, who may or may not be adults, isn’t it. -_-
Dina seems pretty reasonable/tolerable of it to where she’d respect it/not try to convert becky against it even if she does also prefer science, but i’d assume at least this specific church Becky/Lucy are going to wouldn’t condone/encourage /help out the actions that Ross took
i guess its’ good if you can keep your romantic life and religious beliefs separate b/c i’m sure becky would not want to try to drag dina here, but she’d prolly be overjoyed if she did somehow convert
Crucially, Becky genuinely believes in science, which is the big sticking point for Dina; her partner being atheist isn’t important to her, and their being religious doesn’t deeply bother her; she primarily cares whether or not you’re the type of religious person who ignores objective reality.
Hey, real question(s) though? How do newcomers know if they’re singing the song right? What if they don’t know how to read music? What if they can read the words on the paper but don’t know the tune? Is it considered rude not to know the words/tune if you’re attending? Is it ruder not to sing at all? Will you be singled out for singing incorrectly? Are there consequences? Like real ones, not just somebody’s aunt frowning and writing a mean fanfic about you. If I walk into a church next… whenever you people have your gatherings (Sunday morning?) and everyone is singing and I don’t know the song, what’s the generally acceptable thing to do in that scenario? I’m not actually going, but if I did?
And don’t give me any of that “depends on the church/denomination” shit, that’s a copout for people who don’t have a real answer. I know things depends on stuff, but is it remotely possible to answer any of those questions in a normal way?
Don’t sing at first (or mouth along silently), listen to the melody, which for group singing won’t be doing anything too fancy, and come in when you feel you’ve picked up. No music reading required.
They don’t give you sheet music to these songs (they would for old hymns, but not the poppy worship music), you’re just expected to know them and read the lyrics off a projector screen. Not knowing them is a faux pas akin to not knowing whatever popular songs are currently on the radio because the only reason you wouldn’t know them was if you listened to secular music instead, which is Bad.
To date myself, I was once told I was going to hell for listening to Katy Perry by a youth minister, and I was just… so confused.
i’m just picturing snarky teens butchering it on purpose but i imagine it’s not rly ‘required’ the same way churches have their own choirs but not everyone’s a singer so i imagine ppl can just quietly and respectfully listen since im sure there are older christian uptight ladies that’d look down on you if you got the song right but horribly off key lol
I went to a Catholic school as an atheist with atheist friends, and I can absolutely promise you that we did butcher these songs, but not in the sense of singing the tune wrong. Because we were #edgy, we replaced the lyrics with “Satanic” versions. Never got caught.
in a Catholic church, usually a priest or an organist/pianist sets the rhythm of a given song and sings the verses and chorus, and the faithful sing only the chorus, which is easy to follow and sometimes the text is displayed on the screen next to the altar. Due to the fact that the organist sings through loudspeakers, it is easy for the faithful to avoid singing. Plus there is even a parable that God is more pleased with the singing of the faithful who are deaf to the tone than the singing of an unfaithful singer.
and now, since i’m nearly this many ||||| | decades old, I’m frowning in confusion at the juxtaposition of “Catholic church” and “screen next to the altar”
–Dave, and then I am reminded that that was prooobably one in the USA somewhere
ps: I am very familiar with ‘screen next to / above / totally oversized compared to altar’ but that was in fundamentalist churches here in knoxville or nearby which other members of my quartet attend so that we’ve also sung there a few times ourselves
Is not required, but the ministry will spot you, not singing, and “passive-agressively” will tell church they will sing the song again, because they felt didn’t sing it with all their soul.
Or people are refraining because sins, of fear from take another step towards God. Something like that.
Did that seriously happen? Man, the stories here are sometimes so far removed from my own church experiences that I can’t help but wonder if some people are making them up.
None of our hymn books had sheet music, but there was a choir who sang in front of a microphone and the gist is that you could follow their lead. A lot of the songs have the same tune as other well-known folks songs because that’s often what folks songs did: take the church music, that “everyone” knew (at the time) and add different lyrics. So that can help, too.
There’s also the more pop/rock stuff we had once a month. Some of that was projected above the pulpit with a sort of (Disney deep dig here) “if you want to sing along, follow the bouncing ball” thing going on.
Also like someone else above said yeah, often whoever was playing the music on the organ/keyboard etc would play the verse before people joined in, so you can hear the tune.
Forgot to answer the second half of the question but, I went to a pretty casual set of churches and generally speaking if you couldn’t follow along (for whatever reason) you just stood up and smiled with everybody else and then sat down at the end and it was all good.
“the church music, that “everyone” knew (at the time) and add different lyrics”
Historian and musician here. With protestant church music, it was often the other way around – folk tunes were adapted into church music. Luther was a pioneer in pilfering good tunes for ecclesiastical purposes.
I know later on in the US that the Union movement took the church tunes because they were pretty and folks knew them and changed the lyrics so they made sense.:)
I’ve only ever been to church services tied to weddings and funerals, which tend to have a fixed agenda, so it was relatively easy to fly under the radar by just sitting, standing, and kneeling whenever everyone else did. “Caring whether everyone sang well enough” was never on the itinerary.
The other thing with weddings and funerals is that it is expected that people who are not members of that denomination or are not regular church goers will be in attendance so no one expects everyone to be familiar with what’s going on.
The variety of answers probably tells you that it really does depend on the church.
For my experience with a single church which I went to for a very brief time… well, nobody would even notice if you were quietly going “maaaamaaamaaa” while everyone else sang. Maybe the people next to you, if you weren’t quiet enough. So faking you knowing the song would be highly unlikely to be noticed and if it was nobody there would care.
You could sit it out and you’d probably get a well-meaning comment at the end of “are you okay dear, I noticed you weren’t singing” but from my (again, very limited) experience any answer other than “it all sucks anyway” or similar would be treated with a measure of respect and probably encouragement to not be shy when you’re ready.
From the other comments it seems my experience was an unusual one.
Note that by “sit it out” I mean sitting it out entirely. Everyone else standing to sing but sitting and not. I did do that on more than one occasion and it was noticed, but not treated as a big deal.
Exvangelical from less culty but pretty culturally conservative denominations: Over the last couple of decades there’s been a pretty significant shift here noticeable at an individual church level that’s been pretty consistent at any church in my part of the world: people singing along are now in the minority. The modern praise and worship songs are written to be performed on a stage rather sung as a group like traditional hymns were, so probably about 50% of people just listen to the band, 25% kind of mumble under their breath, and 25% actually sing. Percentages vary depending on the exact denomination and the local church culture, but it’s generally within that sort of ballpark I’d say.
Older songs would be designed more to be easy to pick up, and when I was a kid most people (but still not all) sang along. The band still usually plays through the first verse instrumentally first to give everyone a chance to pick up the tune, and then if it was an unfamiliar song you’d often just listen for the first verse and chorus before joining in for the rest of the song which would just repeat that pattern. Nowadays though there are a lot more vocal flourishes and variations throughout the song that will trip you up if you don’t already know it though, and a lot of songs require better vocal technique and broader range than most untrained singers are capable of, which is I think why most people kinda just gave up (and we’re just culturally not as used to singing recreationally as we used to be).
This is something I used to care about and was a real bugbear of mine back when I was still invested in my local church. Weird to think of how unimportant and irrelevant it seems to me now.
Listen to the joyful noise that comes out of some people who know the words and the tune by heart, and you will feel more confident. Just do your best — it’s not for your neighbor anyway.
stand up and sit down when everyone else does. you don’t have to sing or say anything. you don’t have to bow your head in prayer, but if they join hands, you’ll have to do that. you don’t have to put money in the basket.
don’t take communion if they have it.
They may have a greeting ritual, done in the middle of the service, called (it was called “passing of the peace” in our bulletins. There’s a short script, we shook hands with everyone around us and said “peace be with you” or responded “and also with you”)
If you do want to sing along, the words may be in the bulletin or in a hymnal, and you don’t have to worry about being in tune, most of the congregants probably don’t know how to sing either.
I’m an Episcopalian. We’re a Protestant denomination but with separate origins from the Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists or any of the various Evangelical denominations. Music gets a lot of emphasis in our church.
We have a standard hymnal (the 1982 Hymnal) plus several other supplemental ones that parishes are free to use if they wish. The origins of the tunes are all over the map. Some are old folk songs or secular songs that were given religious texts. Some (especially in the supplemental ones) are more contemporary or have non-European origins. There’s also some that are from Bach, Brahms, Tallis, Palestrina, etc. A lot of them are in 4-part harmony (we don’t have a separate “choir edition”).
Episcopal churches generally DON’T have a “band”. There’s an organist, a director and a choir (the organist and director are often the same person). If the parish is wealthy the choir may be made up of trained singers that get paid, but generally they’re people from the parish. For Christmas and Easter you might hire a couple of string players, again depending on the parish’s finances. To answer your central question, the organist plays through the hymn once before everyone starts singing.
In contrast to the Roman Catholic church, just about everyone sings. If you can sing the parts, go ahead and sing the parts (but in that case you may well be approached to join the choir). If you can’t sing in tune, sing anyway. No one will get on your case about it, nor will they get on your case if you don’t sing at all.
Episcopalians sing a lot. There’s at least 4 hymns in every service. There’s also often at least one or two short prayers that get sung, and the Psalm reading is often chanted. In fact, if you really want to get into it the 1982 Hymnal has a section that gives musical settings (songs or chants) for just about every prayer in the service. My parish used to chant the Lord’s Prayer for a few years, although that’s not common. Additionally, when Communion is being distributed the choir sings an anthem, a song that is more complex to sing than the hymns and that ONLY the choir sings, the parishioners won’t have the music to do so. The choir practices for an hour to an hour and a half one weeekday evening and for 45 minutes before the service. So they all get to know each other well and are a bit of a mafia at times. They’re generally a fun group. Full disclosure; I’ve sung tenor in my church choir for years.
These aren’t complicated songs. In fact, it’s just the opposite: hymns and praise songs are written specifically to be easy for the complete novice to pick up and remember easily. Many hymns just set religious words to a familiar secular tune and called it a day. Almost every song that is sung in church will be verse, refrain, repeat as necessary, so even if you’ve never heard it before, you just have to listen to it one time through and you know how it goes. The average congregant isn’t expected to do anything fancy with harmony.
For assistance, there’s typically a leader at the front, if not a whole choir, with piano, organ, or band accompaniment. Words are in a hymnal (along with music in that case), projected on a screen, or printed in the paper bulletin.
As for “doing it wrong,” frankly you would have to mess up pretty bad for anybody to even notice. Nobody cares all that much if you’re a little off key or even skip the song entirely.
This is very funny to me, because I have literally never been to a church service – but I have sang, in a choir, but also in some assemblies like… everyone in all the schools I went to. I am surprised this is a question for anyone.
You sing it by following as best you can, it’s not rude to not know the lyrics, and you get better over time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Obviously how judgemental people might be depends on the individual church like literally any situation in which one might sing/do anything in a group for the first time.
Willis went straight to the point, and he knows what he talks when the subject is christianity.
That’s the one of part of nowadays I hate the most. All the worship songs, every ministry, every work of media, sound, light, harmony, everything work in one way: destroy and renegade all your life, to make you feel an useless shit, and depending your life to church.
I don’t even know if for Christ, for church, for pastor… It’s an abusive relationship and they fuck “proselite” it, calling people to join it.
I don’t think so, or if she is it’s a very unusual one (the pockets, the collar, the cut all look pretty different to most cableknit jumpers I’ve come across).
looks like a normal turtleneck to me, well teh ‘turtleneck’ area might be a bit thicker, and with pockets but i think willis just uses references on online sites
Meh, if you’re not hacking group consciousness it can hardly be called a religion, then they’re just weird beliefs that you refuse to check against reality.
Walky, christian churches literally call their attendees their “flock” and “sheep”*, what did you expect? The POINT of sheep is that they’re going to be repeatedly sheared and, once they reach a certain point, killed and eaten.
*amazing how they get to say the scam out loud, and people still fall for it
Wrt sheep- actual sheep- they’ve been bred to the point where they’re dependant on us. As in they don’t shed their wool- other animals shed their fur but sheep do not. They literally need to be sheared, or it’ll just get matted and soaked and filthy and heavy and they’ll start to overheat in summer.
I’m not sure where that fits into the analogy. Perfect analogy of what is desired from the “flock” of “sheep”, I suppose? To be genuinely reliant on their “shepherd”?
What I’m hearing you say is that they created a problem that didn’t exist in the first place, and then went “the only way to make it through this is to let us exploit you.” I wonder how THAT could relate to religion.
I’m confused. Why are people so upset by this song? I would greatly appreciate if anyone could explain to me in a, uh, non-judgy way I guess. I sang songs like these for a long time, so it’d mean a lot to me if I’m not met with ”oh look there’s a cult member” for asking this.
okay, so, culty is overstating it a bit!
probably because walky is young and likely a little skeeved by religion given the whole kidnapping incident which was 50% religiously motivated
but! people do not like being told “you only have [strength/hope/any given good quality] if you believe in this”
it comes across to many a lot like someone saying “you couldn’t cope without me” or even “you’re not worth anything without me”
these are things most people would be worried about someone saying to them, especially if that person is “in charge”
I do recognise the difference between a hymn and a partner/boss/parent saying some fucked up shit, but these things certainly seem to rhyme if you have reason to look for it
So, that’s my perspective on it
(as an aside one could potentially draw a line between walky’s mother’s behaviour and this. I don’t really have enough data to be conclusive there but I think she certainly acts like “you’re smart/good/perfect so long as you do what I say/don’t hang out with hoodlums/never disappoint me”)
It’s that the song (and others you’re familiar with I’m sure, because I used to sing a lot along this vein when I went to church) give all your good things, “the glory” of everything you’ve ever done to god, insinuating you are worthless without his divine intervention. But of course you own all the sin and mistakes. It takes away a lot of your personal agency and diminishes your own accomplishments and achievements in life. If you succeed, it’s because of divine intervention/his grace. If you fail, it’s not because he withheld grace though, it’s because you messed up and need to grovel for forgiveness. Also, hugs, I know reflecting on this stuff is hard, especially when you’ve been raised with it.
Here is my perspective as a total outsider (I’m Jewish (and atheist, but that bit isn’t important here))
I have never heard this song before. To me it comes off as very creepy that they are singing like their whole personality comes from God. Like they are just puppets that God acts through. And they don’t seem to mind.
For comparison, there weren’t that many English songs in Synagogue services (mostly we just sang the prayers themselves, and in Hebrew, not English) but there is one English song I remember, and here are the lyrics:
Oh Lord, my God
I pray that these things never end
The sand and the sea
The rush of the waters
The crash of the heavens
The prayer of the heart
It is different in that is counts God as responsible for natural phenomena, and hopes that the singer maintains a connection with God, but does not imply that the singer is entirely… A stand-in for God without free will of their own.
I’m with you here. This song is basically about leadership. Like most social structures, leadership and being led can become diseased, but it’s not necessary or inevitable.
Nothing about the lyrics in the comic says ‘leadership’ to me, certainly not _good_ leadership. They say ‘dependency’ and ‘fluffing the leaders’s ego’.
Taking away all of your success and happiness and assigning it to someone else whilst making you own an your failures and everything you don’t like about yourself is a form of coercive control. You’re worthless without me so don’t even think about how messed up this relationship is. I didn’t get assaulted by this particular hymn during the daily services of my decade in religious boarding school, but I did get another very similar one:
“When I survey the wondrous cross / on which the probe of glory died / my richest gain I count but loss / and pour contempt on all my pride.”
On a related note one of my close family members tried to have the priest justify Ephesians 5:22+ at her wedding. The one which would have the wife obey the husband in all things, but so long as the husband loves his wife it’s all good. And I’m just like o_0. Do neither of you realise how awful that is?
Basically, it comes across in the same way the pamphlet I got from a random guy in the street about Christianity did: passive aggressively judgemental and like you’re not really a good or valuable person on your own, you’re just one of God’s puppets who can’t do anything right alone.
And while I do think religion can have benefits, that is only so if expressed in a balanced, measured and reasonable way.
And like yeah, this is just a song at the end of the day, but religion is supposed to direct how you live your life and make decisions, so it should have some accountability for the messages it expresses.
Thank you everyone so much for taking the time and having the patience to explain this to me!! <3<3
This is very interesting, I think my ADHD might have actually saved me from the whole context? Both now and when I was in church as a teen.
I’ve always attributed certain words to very specific concepts which means
A) I tend to sound pretentious because I only use the ONE WORD I feel is perfect for the situation, and
B) I have trouble communicating with others because they’ll use other words, which means I read a whole bunch of subtext into it, which leads to misunderstandings and makes us all frustrated, and
C) I often misinterpret written text.
So to ME, text like in this song would mean something like
”I put faith and hope in many things, one of which is God. I find strength in God to supplement my own strength. God is a nice thing to have in my already rich and established personality.”
Which is funny, cause now I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to be interpreted, but I think it’s a better interpretation, and it certainly saved me from yet another teenage crisis..!
vastly depends on the specific parish and, to a greater extent, your family though
like, father frank who does an absolutely minimal sermon because he has to do three more masses today and would really like to catch the game is a bit different than the lads in the big church up the town ensuring it goes on for at least an hour and is at least 50% in latin
And they both pay money and homage to the fucker who leads a pedophile ring and calls transfolk “nuclear weapons against the plan of god”, so is there really a meaningful difference?
In terms of the literal experience of the service? Yes, very much so
In terms of the organisation they support? Of course not
I think it’s very clear in what context I was speaking
There’s a phenomenon I’m seeing lately, in some bigger US cities, of schismatic Catholic churches going the OTHER way than usual — “We’re keeping the services the way you like them, but we aren’t paying dues or lip service to the Pope until he cleans up the pedo rings and starts accepting LGBTQ identities as 100% valid, and also abortion is okay.”
Highly recommended if you really still need some ritualized Jesus in your life but you hate the modern right wing.
Ok, but then they’re not, by definition, catholic. “The Pope says what” is one of the prime tenets of catholicism. Like, if the pope says, as he does, that abortions are againt the will of god, then that’s a matter of doctrine, and the pope is infallible in terms of catholic doctrine. That’s part of the mandatory rules of catholicism.
careful – infallibility in ordinary speech is emphatically NOT Catholic dogma for him. the doctrine’s been invoked like somewhere between one and three times total? one of which I think was over Mary, the GodMom, being born without original sin.
when the Pope’s talking or issuing papal bull or whatever he’s no more infallible than anyone else, he has to specifically invoke it and it’s a Big thing and these days would literally make headlines worldwide.
–Dave, Catholic fan headcanon has some odd stuff in it
Papal statements are not infallible unless he says he’s speaking ex cathedra. Otherwise they are guidance to the faithful but are subject to revision if he or one of his successors so chooses.
And there’s a reason for that hesitancy in invoking infallibility, and it becomes apparent when you consider what happens if a new infallible statement contradicts any old infallible statement. Infallibility allows no refutation, every single infallible statement made throughput history has to align — one single contradiction is an immediate game over.
Far from allowing Popes some OP ability to say what they want and have it accepted as truth, infallibility walls them in, progressively limiting what they’re able to say. A wise pope will make as few officially infallible statements as possible during their reign.
Has Walky always dropped the Gs at the end of words? I thought that was more of a Sal thing. And it’s interesting that he’s talking more like Sal as he starts to understand what she went through at boarding school.
Been there, Walky. She’s a good kid who is warm for your form, but you’ve got to decide if you can deal with her faith, and she’s got to decide if she can deal with your lack of one.
At least yours was honest about it and took you to a church. Mine invited me to a ‘youth club’ while rubbing up against me, robbing my brain of needed blood.
My first indication of failure was the old guy at the entrance of the pizza place who thanked her for finding the new ‘convert’ before asking me if I was ready ‘to give my life to the Lord’.
My answer of “ha! Yeah, fuck no.” was not appreciated and earned me the classic ‘You should go, but we will pray for you.’
There’s no middle ground really when you come to think about the fundamentals (no pun intended).
Either God actually is the source of everything good, like the Light Side of the Force and you are enjoying a relationship with it.
Or God doesn’t exist and any time and effort devoted to praising the entity is a waste of time, effort, and space.
There’s no “God is a minor thing you just ignore” if you have any sincerity about the thing. Ironically, unless God is something that you just use as a prop in your life to prop up your existing prejudices.
No, I mean I don’t know what a “Speaker of the House” is. I’m aware that freaks are in charge of everything, but my original comment was more about fundamentalism itself not giving somebody the power to arrest somebody else. I guess I should have phrased it closer to that, but whatever.
The head of the US House of Representatives. Selected nominally by vote of the whole House, but practically by the majority party. Currently one Mike Johnson, who’s an ultraconservative Christian and a real piece of work.
“There’s no middle ground really when you come to think about the fundamentals (no pun intended).”
If we’re talking the full range of ideas of ‘God’, there is, really. Like the Deist God who started up the universe but doesn’t interfere. You can have a God who created the universe but doesn’t know what will happen and wants to find out. There’s process theology stuff where God is also growing over time.
And “source of everything good” is a weird idea. It’s not like God created Dumbing of Age, say. “Ah, but God created _everything_”. Well, then he created everything _bad_ too…
You could have gods whose name isn’t God, which you should not capitalize if you’re not using it as a name. You could have any of the countless ways a deist god or gods could be imagined, not just “the Deist God”.
You can have multiple gods within one cosmology, you could have infinite gods within one cosmology. Multiple gods who disagree, the things that please them in opposition to each other. Or god(s) who becomes pettier over time. A god who is a cosmic platonic ideal beetle, and they didn’t create beetles or the universe willfully, but the universe emanated from them and moved along the path that would reflect the cosmic beetle the best by having the most beetles in it, and humans are just a side-effect.
Oh Walky. The sex orgy cults all end in mass suicides. If Lucy and Becky are okay with this congregation, I think he can handle it. Charles puts up with Linda, so this seems much easier.
What I’m hearing in the comments on here is that in churches with a band the band performs the music and the people mostly listen. Worship is something you do. What I’m hearing here is that people in those churches don’t worship, they watch and listen to other people perform worship.
I recently got served a video with two Catholic priests reviewing the movie Dogma, which I thought had about a 15% chance to be funny so I watched it. Not a lot of laughs, but rather a lot of telling people you need God and He’s the only thing in the world you can rely on and Catholicism is perfect and any contradictions you see is just you misunderstanding Catholicism because no true Scotsman obviously
I thought it was judgmental and displaying a sad lack of intellectual and spiritual curiosity, but it didn’t occur to me to think it sounded like a cult. Walky might need to read up on BITE.
Well, it stands for Behavior control, Information control, Thought control and Emotional control. The “BITE model” is the most direct way I’ve seen to differentiate between cults and not cults.
Oh yes, Kevin Smith is just confused (because plenary indulgence is actually about paying your way out of temporal punishment and doesn’t include God’s forgiveness you know) and the bits about actually believing in something being more important than the letter of the law is. . .not in fact addressed in any way.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of religion, especially because my Grandma raised me in the summers and was very fond of her church and community.
But there are some parts of Christianity that are so insidious, and they deeply affect new believers. There’s a Hiveworks comic I deeply vibed with, Stand Still Say Silent, and you could tell by the artist’s comments that they were enjoying life, their comic, and their community. I went and checked out their more recent posts, and it was like their personality completely flipped. They spoke down about themself and their work, claiming it was no longer good because it was before they found God. Like everything before they became Christian was worthless. That THEY were worthless, because God was great. They had found religion, but it had obviously harmed them. I felt like it was so tragic.
So, all this to say, I get why Walky is so uncomfortable. I wonder if he’s going to talk with Lucy about how these lyrics made him feel, or if he’s going to joke it off.
Seems pretty obvious, it’s the kind that encourages you to shit all over everything you’ve ever done that didn’t have some weird pervert’s personal seal of approval.
Yeah, that’s fair.
But there’s such a huge difference between mainstream religions and serious cults that calling them the same thing really diminishes the dangers of the cults.
Mainstream religions cause problems on a societal scale, but you’re not likely to wind up drinking Kool-Aid on a compounds somewhere.
I’m agreeing with you, but I want to point out mainstream religions cause problems on a personal scale too. Obviously in different ways and/or amounts, but I was raised in a mainline protestant denomination and it fucked me up a bit.
I dunnot, that’s like saying that there’s no difference between a mom and pop corner shop and a international supermarket chain. Sure, both may abuse their staff and screw over their customers, but the first at least takes a personal interest while the latter doesn’t even name their retail-cattle before slaughtering them.
This is actually way less creepy than the Christian music at a church service I attended in college because a cute girl invited me. The band there was singing about how much we all sucked and how dependent we should be on sky-daddy to fix us.
I gritted my teeth through that, but things got REAL dramatic after the dominionist sermon. They invited congregants to come up and witness (I think that’s the right word) and when I worked my way through the line and was given a turn at the microphone… well, let’s just say I didn’t exactly win friends and influence people.
Not for nothin’, but was the doomsday imminent in the “okay here’s everybody’s cup please form an orderly line for your arsenic tablet” sense, or in the “we fuckin’ swear this time guys any day now you’ll see you’ll all see” sense?
–Dave, the people in charge of printing up the bingo cards for 2024 have basically just thrown their hands up in the air and are using yarrow stalks to cast the I Ching
Oof. I wanted to like Lucy with Walky. I really did. I warmed up to her as a person for a bit, but ever since they officially got together, it’s been hard slogging. She’s way too invested in things, Walky’s not invested at all, and the bulk of their interactions with other people have so far only served to highlight just how little chemistry they have. I don’t necessarily want him to get with Amber or Dorothy again, but Lucy…she’s just not the one. I give Walky credit for the growth he’s made with expressing emotions and supporting the people around him, but Lucy is just not it for him. They’re fine friends but I just can’t see this working as any kind of romantic relationship, and at this point I hope Walky sinks this ship before either of them will get hurt any worse.
Walky is me whenever I somehow find myself at a religious service these days. I’m sure to people who actually this stuff it’s comforting, but it creeps my atheist ass out.
My mum’s a high degree of catholic, and whenever she comes around singing her church’s latest hymn my head just shoots up from whatever I’m doing and I go “do you even UNDERSTAND those words you’re speaking, or do you just like the metric with that rhythm?”
Preaching and religious singing are not about words, they’re about emotions and social patterns. The preacher isn’t communicating with you, he is herding the group’s social patterns and emotions. You will see that a preacher’s sermons have a rythm and pattern to them, and that pattern is more important than the actual words. They’re basically using the tropes that the flock is familiar with to hack the collective consciousness. Their intent isn’t even bad, it’s just a completely alien form of social interaction to us atheists. We only allow marketing departments to hack our behaviour that way.
Love that analysis and the innocent twist at the end. Yep, same marketing, one wants to sell you eternal life, one wants to sell you all other products. They both want your money.
In fairness, at least on the individual preacher side (and this is in various forms of Protestantism), I have personally seen a range of motivations from, “As the person responsible for your spiritual health, I need to encourage you to give your money because I sincerely believe you will be blessed by the act of giving,” to… things that felt less sincere. E.g. bigwig members of the church’s parent organization who come to individual church events (anniversaries, etc.) to both preach and (ya know, while they’re in the neighborhood) get the congregation to give money which (at least in part) goes to them and to the pastor of the church. Maybe they are sincere in their belief that that’s truly a way for the congregants to be blessed too, and those particular churches have a tradition where the pastor and visiting pastors get a gift on anniversaries, but seeing bigwigs raise money like that always felt wayyyy sketchy from an outsider’s perspective.
I’ve also seen, “The organization needs funding to continue its work, and/or keep the lights on,” which isn’t unreasonable in itself. But, all of these things get a good deal more uncomfortable when God specifically is running the shakedown / pledge drive / (if you’re really unlucky) indulgences.
(All of which – other than the actual indulgences – are still better than “Help me buy another jet, because the one you bought me last month isn’t big enough.” But, it’s also (theoretically) not a race to the bottom.)
That’s the preachers, though. The organizations themselves, inasmuch as they want anything, definitely want your money.
(Love the analysis, too. Only thing I’d add to it is that in some more bookish Christian religious traditions, there’s a lot more communication going on, that other religious activities like Bible study may involve more actual teaching and communication than preaching itself does, and that this emotional manipulation is arguably a part of all social religious ritual to some extent. Not even in an inherently bad way: musical pieces, group cohesion and other psychological effects from singing together, exposure to beauty, all of those have an effect.)
I’m a lifelong atheist, and also spent my life avoiding or resisting marketing hacks. I won’t claim to be 100% immune, but it’s pretty hard for a paid ad to even reach me, and I do lots of evaluation of unit price or reviews checking, and avoiding impulse purchases.
This is not even among the worst worship lyrics.
This one does not directly say “i’m a terrible worm without you“, but implicitly, yeah.
I grew up with all this crap that basically kept me with god, because it implied i’d be horrible otherwise.
Turns out i’m not.
Self-confidence is only sinful because they’re scared of losing your tithes.
First time I went to Catholic service with my then-girlfriend, now wife, I had this exact thought when the priest said “and Peace be with you” and they all answered in unison.
It’s encouraging self-abnegation and low self-worth. “All my hope is in you” is pretty creepy, even more so when the target shows no actual sign of existing.
It’s slowly occurring to me that the real reason I grew up with a healthy attitude on religion is because of my parents and friends, not because of the Catholic church. (Granted, I’m led to understand that the average Catholic congregation in the US is a bit more chill than the average Bible-belt nondenominational congregation these days, but still.)
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Walky prefers the cult of the lamb
I like that his relationship with Lucy has been forcing Walky to actually think about the more fucked-up aspects of Christianity, rather than just making fun of Joyce whenever she says anything because everyone already knows they dislike each other.
This was not meant to be a reply. Gah.
I mean, still a good observation
I’ve heard that is delicious. Wait did you say cult?
I’d prefer a cut of lamb to this.
I was expecting at least one person to recognise that but ok
Re: last panel,
yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup
I don’t know. I mean the song is wayyyy creepy and to be honest pretty much every major religion feels a little culty, but I don’t think the Indiana State University’s local church engages in the kind of coercive tactics to maintain and/or expand leadership that would define a cult. Even if they wanted to, I think board might have something to say about that once outcry led to them loosing salary bonuses.
Wait unless you where talking about evangelism as a whole, in which case… probably.
Well, the rhetoric of religious and political cults alike is used by a lot more than just cults themselves precisely *because* it’s designed by cult leaders to proliferate beyond their groups. It’s meant to be unwittingly picked up and spread by ordinary people to legitimize cult ideologies, make said ideologies more palatable to those in America’s religious and political mainstream, and eventually recruit them.
It’s precisely because Christian/conservative cults are so effective at this that their techniques are used by a lot more than just the cults — they are small but disproportionately influential groups in the religious red state in which the comic is set.
That *would* explain how the Republican party devolved into the dysfunctional hive mind everyone’s had to put up with today…..
A lot of that also has to do with Reagan trying to tie the Republican party to the white religious right as a political ploy. He brought in that cult mentality on purpose.
“The” local church? Depending on how much walking they wanna do, Google indicates 8 churches around IU Bloomington they could be at.
Good catch, I should have done more research. It would make sense that IU is very different from my college, which had only one church.
IUB has like 40,000 undergrads these days? Plus the grad students and whole rest of the town.
jesus christ that is a university bigger than many of the towns the students came from
Indeed it is! Discovered that during swing dance with some undergrads. For me it was the smallest town I’d lived in by a couple orders of magnitude, for her it was the biggest, also by a couple orders…
My uni had like 20 times the population of the town I grew up in.
An understandable mistake. My wife’s college had a church on campus, one of their largest buildings in fact.
It’s United Methodist. That’s a mainline denomination, it’s a LGBTQ friendly congregation.
Probably a good idea to not confuse the real life United Methodist church in Bloomington with the one in the Dumbiverse, for privacy sake at a bare minimum. Also the UMC is apparently schisming right now.
Heh. Any particular wedge issues driving the schism?
just LGBTQ+ rights, and whether or not we will be allowed into heaven
Wait I thought they were supposed to be LGBTQ friendly?
I’d like more details if that’s possible. :/
I don’t want to spam with a link, but to cut and paste from the first Google hit for “UMC schism”, the gist of it seems to be that the denomination may vote in 2024 to rescind their stance banning gay marriage and gay ordained individuals, but in the meantime 1/5 of their churches have de-affiliated (over it? On both sides of the argument?) since 2019.
> More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.
> Those figures emerge following the close of regular meetings in June for the denomination’s regional bodies, known as annual conferences. The departures began with a trickle in 2019 — when the church created a four-year window of opportunity for U.S. congregations to depart over LGBTQ-related issues — and cascaded to its highest level this year.
> Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.
thx that makes sense, yeeeeaaaah 👀
The writing is on the wall, as it were.
Held up by a tack or nail perhaps? And wall looks oddly door-like.
Another question is, are they LGBTIQIA+ friendly, or just mildly LG friendly?
It depends on the congregation, there’s a group of United Methodist Churches that are however friendly this is.
Thanks!
That first bit sounds really great. If i’d still be a believer, this is what i’d advocate for. I like that they phrase it as “LGBTQ+ persons are a good expression of God’s diverse creation”. This makes sense theologically.
I’m not a believer anymore because there’s so many other red flags, but i see myself as an ally of everyone who’s faith runs along those lines 🙂
“Believe what we tell you to, or when you die our god will torture you in a lake it make out of fire for the rest of eternity.”
That’s all of christianity. It’s not a nice cult.
Yeah, well. My god can beat up your God, and makes me fireproof, so your lake has no effect on me. 👅
I mean, not necessarily. There are Christian denominations which specifically teach that Jesus saved all sinners from Hell by dying on the cross, regardless of whether they believe or not.
Of course, even then there’s usually an assumption (unspoken or otherwise) that all humanity would be going to Hell if not for Jesus’ intervention— and, more chillingly, that every single one of them would deserve it— so yeah, still at least somewhat culty.
If you can think of a christian belief, there is a denomination that disagrees with it.
Pretty much the only things all christians agree on are:
1) They think they’re christian.
2) They think Jesus was important.
Recent occurrences in some evangelical congregations seem to indicate that Jesus is no longer the primary focus. One pastor stated that after he preached on the Sermon on the Mount, some in the church wanted to know where he got that sissified nonsense. When explained that those were Jesus’s words, the congregant was dismissive, claiming that such liberal garbage wouldn’t work these days.
So, yeah. Cult. Just a different one.
There are several different views on Hell out there, but a large portion of Christian theologians today, even evangelical ones, don’t buy into the active torture version. Generally, Hell is defined as being separate from God. So, more like God not forcing people to spend eternity in God’s presence if they’re not a fan of God. I think most folks like a *little bit* of punishment in their view of Hell, because obviously Hitler and other nasty people (nasty in history or just nasty in your own life, like an abusive partner or something) deserve some punishment, but a lot of views of Hell focus a lot less on the punishment and more on the just “it actually sucks being separate from God.” Several versions, as mentioned above, involve Jesus’s death saving everyone or even people getting to change their minds after they decide Hell sucks. It’s still obviously an uncomfortable point of the Christian faith for a lot of folks, but there’s a lot more nuance to the actual theological study around it than just “burn forever, everybody who isn’t us”
1. Indiana State University is another institution, in Terre Haute.
2. IU is surrounded by churches. You can probably find just about any kind you’re looking for.
3. That song is creepy? You haven’t heard creepy!
There’s only one difference between a cult and a religion, and it’s the size of the organization. If Christianity only had 50 members, it would be called a cult. And that’s the only reason Scientology is called a religion as well.
This is offensive. Dumbing of Age doesn’t take place at Indiana STATE University! That’s in Terre Haute!!!!!
Yeah, the cult there is devoted to Larry Bird.
Here Vigo again.
my opinion of this is that it became a cult for Walky when he realized that Becky (who was absolutely raised in a cult, that has an ACTUAL BODY COUNT now) was so familiar with the tune.
You stumbled into the point.
Organized religion is ALL a cult
Considering how much he ragged on Joyce over it before, i’m surprised it wasn’t more common knowledge to him but i guess you have to be there to realize it
makes me wonder if lucy would be ‘thirsty’ enough to abandon her religion for walky lol (tho i’ve heard the opposite is more common where christian girls are ‘seduced’ by some playboys or whatever)
tho i don’t think lucy would be as ‘far gone’ as joyce was (who is an atheist now so yeah), since i think her paretns were prolly more normal/stable about it, liek at one point i think lucy did like Harry Potter (tho not that it’s aged well), or at least had enough knowledge to ask Jen what her “hogswarts house” is, and i def believe a handful of christian parents would never have let their children read/watch harry potter
Seems equally likely that Joyce being so extreme is what prompted her eventual atheist transition, and Lucy, being much more mainstream to begin with, would find it harder to abandon religion altogether. Her beliefs being much more accepting make them, in turn, easier to accept (and thus harder to reject).
The beliefs themselves are often a major factor. “Either everything in the Bible literally happened (as we interpret it), or all of it is lies and God does not exist” does not hold up well to experiencing the real world.
Hence the “Evangelical Bubble” that Joyce grew up in, where anything that conflicts with their “worldview” (such as actually meeting someone with different beliefs) is strenuously avoided.
“Seduced” hell, every one is different. I’ve known girls who were quite willing to throw down with the right dude regardless of how they worshipped. (and no, they didn’t throw down with ME, either.)
It only takes a little rationalization to get Lucy in bed with Walky, no matter what she believes.
Yeah, “Will the Christian girl abandon her faith to sleep with an atheist, since those are the only choices?” is a bit weird when Becky is right there on panel.
Walky’s smart enough not to have assumed Joyce’s fundie upbringing is what the whole of Christianity is like. Now he’s wondering if maybe he should have.
Walky, they will expect you to do this every Sunday morning.
Maybe she’d be willing to compromise with Walky on a church with a different emphasis that averages distance from their comfort zones. The denomination I grew up in focuses much more on gratitude and engaging with the community.
Dunno about it not being an orgy cult. “My dick is in you, lord, in you, it’s in you”
That IS what I assumed he found troubling.
“Wait isn’t this song really horny for church?”
Lol, this reminded me of when I learned about the Gnostic Order of the Serpent or whatever they were called, a heretical order in Europe wiped out in the 13th(?) century. They interpreted the whole “Jesus died for our sins” thing as encouragement to sin, so long as they properly repented afterward. The basic idea being that because Jesus died for your sins, if you don’t sin, then Jesus died for nothing, so it’s better to sin, confess, and repent than to avoid sin entirely as that would undermine Jesus’ sacrifice. IIRC they focused mostly on lust and gluttony, having regular feasts and orgies where they’d indulge heavily in sins of the flesh, and then they’d all crowd into confessional the next day to confess their sins and be told how to repent for them, then they’d serve their penance, and do it all over again next week. Honestly my favorite sect of Christianity and I really wish they could have somehow survived to this day.
I don’t know, this one would probably get pretty low cult scores in BITE theory. Not discouraging contact with non-cult members or discrediting alternate sources of information, not punishing members for leaving, guess we’ll have to see how much they push the collection plate in your face but it doesn’t look like they’re trying to take all the money they can from members. . .
I mean, early on in the recruitment phase, manipulation of behavior, information, etc. aint really that apparent from the get-go, and that’s by design. What goes on first is the *mental prep* as it were that will support the former and insulate it from criticism once inculcated to members on a case-by-case basis.
What about my student loan debt? Is that in the lord too?
if only all the church donations could be spent into actually giving back to the community.
or all teh students passive aggressively ‘pay’ for their debt in those fake money bills wit hthose bible passages on them
yeah sorry
There’s a number of hymns that make me uncomfortable. An all of the new crap.
wow willis
that strip title.
Yup. That’s some cunning linguistics, there.
I saw what you did there.
“for a nickel.”
This is all very unfamilar to me. Is that like a play on ennui, or is there more of a religious thing as illustrated by the comic itself? And please accept my apologies for asking if this is more than folks are willing to delve into.
All good. No, it’s just a sexual innuendo. The song is about being lost in the spirit of God. However, Lucy wants Walky to be “in her” in a sexual way. Also, the alt-text uses xenoglossia (“speaking in tongues,” or sudden unplanned speech in an unknown language) as a euphemism for sexual things people could do with tongues.
“Ennui” would be pronounced differently: “Ahn-WEE” not “In you”.
For more on the sense of losing oneself “in God” as the song describes, see:
Ego death
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death
The biblical letters of Paul call it being “dead to the world”.
Amazingly thorough reply. Thank you very much.
Oh, you are so welcome! Languages are my favorite thing. Thank you for asking!
God asking if it’s in yet because of the shrinking hope and strength levels.
And he’s not even hearing a pre-pubescent child sing about being homesick for heaven.
Yup yup yup.
Note that he raises his concerns with Becky, not with his putative girlfriend.
things might get awkward between him and Lucy, now, for the first time.
“hey this religion you believe is kind of fucked up” is the sort of question that tends to provoke relationship ending arguments.
If nothing else, while actively in the middle of a church service is PROBABLY not the time to broach the subject.
Which is why we approach the issue more diplomatically.
i feel like any at least somewhat (non-terrible) christian who has at least a bit of self awareness would respond with “i know, right?” That would’ve been my response (then again, my use of past tense there might kinda disqualify me as an example)
Lucy’s not known for her nuanced takes or ability to honestly take a second look at her assumptions. She’s busy writing a script in her head about her future fancy church wedding and all the relatives and hundreds of friends telling her how wonderful she is. She will not react well if Walky honestly shares his impressions.
well becky is more of the ‘expert’ and it’d be easier to ask someone who’s gay/someone considered to have aspects that wouldn’t be ‘accepted’ by strict religious ppl yet she also still decides to believe
that said, would Walkys mom respect her more or less if he was like “Yeah, she’s a good christian sheep brainwashed by their cult” (i mean i doubt he’d phrase it that exact way to his mom but still)
He’s known Becky longer, really. Seems reasonable to me.
Becky’s response is kind of concerning, too. “Troubling” in the context of you liking your cult’s version better is….
I feel like this isn’t even in the top third of ‘uncomfortable religious songs’.
Yeah, this is standard Christian theology not children singing about how they can’t wait to die.
….. i’m glad i’ve never heard THOSE ONES before.
I airways found “We Will Dance” pretty troubling, even when I was still Christian.
For hilariously unintentional double entendres, though, “In the Secret” is pretty tough to beat…
Honestly in my experience it probably rates in the bottom third? Definitely the bottom half. (Just judging by the lyrics we see in the comic, I haven’t had the displeasure of hearing this particular one.)
It’s pretty mild. Find a copy of that ghastly video version of I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb, but don’t screen it in the dark.
[Mark counters with Heinlein’s If This Goes On–.]
I had Walky’s same epiphany when a girl I had a crush on in middle school invited me to her youth group’s all night lock-in social
what is a lock-in social
It’s when the preachers get a bunch of kids in a church and lock them in all night. I’ve never been to one, but it seems mighty creepy.
i mean, when you phrase it like THAT………. XD
seriously though, it’s basically just a big sleepover. i got invited to a few by christian friends when i was younger. the church in question was one of those converted auditoriums, so they still had basketball hoops and gym equipment to play with, a pile of beanbag chairs, we watched (christian) movies and had popcorn. idk, it seemed pretty standard to me.
Yeah, the “lock-in” part sounds sketchy if you’re looking for reasons to hate it, but it really just means “we will not let your children wander off alone into the night”. Thinking about it they were probably actually more concerned with people wandering off in pairs, but either way the wording makes it sound way more subversive than it actually is.
We had something like that for my HS graduation party. It was at the YM/YWCA (they shared a building). You could use the pool, the gym, the game room, the basketball and racquetball courts all night. The doors were locked so people who weren’t a part of the graduating class could crash the party, or party-goers couldn’t go out and then sneak booze back in (remember this was back in 1972 when 18-year-olds in my state could legally buy and drink beer and hard liquor). If you wanted to go home early you could, but with the knowledge that once you were outside that was it, you weren’t getting back in.
That’s what it was, but of course there was also singing. And watching a bunch of teenagers sing “worship” songs with their hands raised and heads tilted up to the ceiling with looks of ecstasy on their faces was creepy as all ****. Even at 14 and desperate for people to like me, I was like, “I’m out, thanks.”
…… whut.
OMG this what i talkin about this culty shit SOOOOO SUS ☠️
The lock-ins I went to were mostly at arcades or bowling alleys or the like. They were actually pretty fun! And that was even at a pretty conservative church. Eventually got banned from that church because they thought I was a “bad influence” aka gay/emo kid.
I mean, I am gay but it’s not like I knew that at the time.
It’s like youth group, but a sleepover instead of just a few hours on Wednesday evening.
And as others have noted, secular versions exist, usually in other forms of community orgs and youth groups. Honestly, this whole comment section has been pretty full of knee-jerk reactions to fairly mundane things. Even the song lyrics (that we see) don’t really strike me as all that ‘culty’–if you believe in God (I don’t), and that that God is both benevolent and omnipotent, then the above lyrics pretty much make sense. I see no condemnations of non-believers, not even any of the lyrics like “I would die for you” or “Everything good in me comes from you” that we’ve seen earlier.
I mean, I get it–organized religion in general has a lot to answer for. But describing all such groups as ‘cults’ is pretty much making sure no one outside of specific atheist circles will even take you seriously.
It’s probably relevant that Walky is just uncomfortable with the song initially. He’s wary. It’s not until Becky tells him that she thinks the song is normal/common that he concludes it’s seriously messed-up.
For all his joking, Walky actually does have a very clear set of opinions on Joyce’s childhood that he pretends are just lighthearted jabs.
Good point! I hadn’t caught his face of revulsion after Becky answers, on first read. Definite reaction.
Cult in the classical sense? Yes.
In the modern sense? No.
Avoiding the word is a privilege and power thing, like how when poor people behave the same way they’re antisocial lunatics, but when rich people behave the same way they’re just eccentric. This says less about whether the religion qualifies for the word in any objective sense, and more about whether it qualifies as something we fear retribution from if its leadership or sycophants should they hear us badmouthing it.
*poor people behave IN A CERTAIN way grr wtb post preview feature.
“A religion is a cult with an army and a navy.”
— Max Weinreich
I’m not sure of the distinction between “classical” and “modern” sense you’re drawing here. As far as I can tell the use of cult to refer to any mainstream religion is very modern – and appears mostly among atheists looking for a way to bash religion in general.
In the classical sense, ancient religions are often referred to as cults (“temple cult”, “cultic practices”), but that lacks any real connection to the modern negative sense of the term. The definitions are objectively different and have nothing to do with the power of the religion or fear of retribution.
Wikipedia sums it up well:
“Cult is a term, in most contexts pejorative, for a relatively small group which is typically led by a charismatic and self-appointed leader, who excessively controls its members, requiring unwavering devotion to a set of beliefs and practices which are considered deviant (outside the norms of society). This term is also used for a new religious movement or other social group which is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals, or its common interest in a particular person, object, or goal.”
“An older sense of the word involves a set of religious devotional practices that is conventional within its culture, is related to a particular figure, and is frequently associated with a particular place.”
While power isn’t strictly a factor for either definition, the mainstream status that causes Christianity to escape the more modern, more pejorative definition is a form of power.
That probably needs amending to include beliefs and practices that a society considers the norm. “Cult” in the newer, concerning sense refers to a manipulative, controlling group, which is usually but not always small and usually but not always has beliefs considered abnormal. It’s the manipulation and control that matter- a cult that centers around growing crops to give to your community is still a cult if they’re real fucked up about getting you to do it.
My read is that it’s basically two uses – both used pejoratively: One the group with the charismatic, controlling leader, the other the basically harmless but weird group.
It’s really hard to say Christianity (or any of the major denominations) are “led by a charismatic and self-appointed leader”. “excessive control” is obviously a subjective idea, but the level of control in a Catholic or mainline Protestant church is far from what goes in what we normally think of as cults.
There are certainly some, often fundamentalist, churches that do reasonably fall into that category.
But you really need to stretch it to include most mainstream religions.
If Christianity is nominally being led by Jesus/God, then it’s not at all hard to say Christianity is led by a charismatic, self-appointed leader.
Granted, I don’t think Jesus IS presently in a leadership position, but a large chunk of believers acknowledge him as being at the head of Christianity. More to the point, relevant to this particular comic strip, the hymn lyrics frame things that way and that’s shaping Walky’s present take on the religion.
Sure, but that’s stretching the definition to the point it’s useless. It’s absolutely not what that definition means and you know it.
There are problems with every religion, but labeling them all as cults just minimizes the actual dangers involved the real cults
Religions are just cults that survived long enough for their beliefs to be considered “normal” by the general public.
Take my imaginary upvote! That is the nail getting pounded into the board with a single blow from the hammer.
This is just a cynical take from annoyingly edgy atheists.
Or annoyingly accurate atheists.
In absurd supernatural beliefs, there is little objective difference between ‘cults’ and ‘religions’. Between the “an archangel talked to me” of Islam vs Mormonism or some weird new church with 50 adherents, or the invisible entities of medieval angels/demons and Scientology thetans. Transubstantiation and the Virgin Mary and the Trinity, among other things, are absurd, but are hallowed by the weight of 2000 years of cultural dominance.
In the BITE model… mainstream US churches _right now_ might score pretty low, but my father grew up in a 1940s Boston Catholicism that would probably score pretty high. And levels of Behavior Control that might seem cultish for Christianity are just normal for Judaism or Islam.
Sure, the supernatural beliefs are equally absurd and in that sense there’s an equivalence.
But I’d look closer at the BITE model. Obviously mainstream churches will vary, but even 40s Catholicism is low compared to the dangerous cults it’s intended to measure.
And “Judaism” is cultish? Seriously? If you’re just thinking of the Hasidim, I can see the case, but they’re a tiny minority of Jews.
I called out Behavior specifically from BITE, not the whole thing. There’s a _lot_ of rules about behavior in standard orthodox Judaism. Kosher rules, most obviously, with the effect of making it harder to socialize with people outside the religion. Sabbath rules. Daily prayers. Don’t marry non-Jews…
I realized later that medieval Catholicism, if not modern, was higher than I remembered, too. So many fast days, Lent… You wouldn’t have the social isolation effect when everyone was Catholic, though.
Walky I know it’s been a while since you’ve been to church but…You don’t remember the after Praise and Worship orgy? Why the hell do you think anyone gets up at 8 am on a Sunday? Of Course it’s for the ORGY.
that’d def paint the ‘family/relatives dragging you to organized religion’ into context even worse
that early in the day even for sex doesn’t seem worth it, but religious stuff aside i suppose getting it out of the wya and being productive the rest of the day would be nice depending on you/your partners preferences
or ppl having ‘sex breaks’ during lunch or ‘nooners” or whatever XD
Obviously there’s separate rooms so everyone in the family can stay separated. And y’know. A room in the back where kids can play video games with EXCELLENT sound proofing.
Well, that’s why he doesn’t remember. He was under 18 last time he went, so he just played video games.
Oh yeah, that’s probably going to be the fracture point.
Yoto’s Willis Fanart Dump (NSFW)
Found a new place. Hope it works out.
YAY!
niiiiiiiiiiiiice
Bookmarked and saved. You do good drawing
Do you do these colored versions yourself? I wanna see more of ’em!
I do, aye. There’s a few of ’em I did a while back, because coloring is fun. Lemme see if I can find ’em.
Here they are. Most of ’em, anyway. The ones I could find. Multiply blending layers with the actual colors picked directly from the comic, flat on top of your pictures.
Thank you! I love these <3
Did you lose the Walky/Jennifer series?
Nope. But since I’m working on that for patreon I kept it separate. I’ll probably make it it’s own page.
Excellent Excellent Excellent
Omggggggggggggg 🔥
hell yeah
Nice to see how much you’ve grown as an artist! There are some really nice/cute drawings in there.
I’m a bit bothered by your focus on Carla’s nether regions. It’s the polar opposite of Willis’ approach that states Carla’s exact configuration is None Of Your Business.
Haha I get that. I’m trying to do it less.
That said it’s mostly cuz I find it unique and interesting and I’m drawn to features that make particular characters “unique” from the others. (IE. Most of my Billie drawings are boob focused)
Also I just enjoy drawing certain kinds of nether regions more than others while I’m attracted to certain genders more than othersToo bad iguanas aren’t chameleons. 🙁
✊ All hail Lord Yoto, emperor of horny fanarts ✊
“Load 317 More Files”
Dear god, he can’t be stopped.
Wow I had no idea how long you’ve been making fanart. I’ve never even seen that early stuff before
One thing this shows is that the Walkertons weren’t very religious if at all. Which makes Sal being shipped off to a Catholic school very interesting.
They’ve always read as christmas and easter catholics to me, Walky in particular is a pretty good portrayal of a lapsed catholic, I suspect Linda would have been equally happy to ship Sal off to a military school if the judge had suggested it.
Holiday religious is the term I sometimes use. People who identify as a member of a religion, but only go to services maybe three or four times a year on holidays, and feel that things like weddings and funerals need to be in their faith’s place of worship.
Some may also go to a service when something makes them feel guilty about not going enough.
I don’t feel like there are a ton of non-religious boarding schools available.
Military Boarding Schools might have been an option, although those tend to be more of a boy thing, don’t know how much that’s changed.
Also not like it would have been an improvement. Lateral move at best.
there’s prolly not a lot of ‘alternate’ places that’d taken in a ‘troubled teen’ that would’ve been sent to juvie otherwise lol. Or maybe house arrest but that prolly would’ve been worse for sal
*probably
Prolly is a legitimate dialectic difference in pronunciation in spoken English, which, as many things, has been transliterated to written English and used as a tone indicator. Prolly, along with other shorteners like “ur” or “kk” indicates a casual tone from the speaker.
In the same way that not using contractions indicates emphasis or thoughtful/careful speech (see Dina), or dropping the g on -ing words indicates casual tones (both Becky and Walky in this exact comic) in verbal speech. Communicating tone and personality in text is just as important as in speech, and the specific words and spellings people use to do so is the main way to do so.
Ur not being pedantic, ur just wrong.
Jerkass is right tho
yeah i’m too lazy to spell it out so i just shorten it
Walky had a line a while ago that was something like once Sal was at Catholic school, Linda thought that was the whole religion thing covered. He was obviously being flippant, but the point about how religious the family was in general seemed genuine.
Walky’s thought bubble is black and white instead of in color. I think there’s been another like that recently. I kind of liked them in color, it made it more obvious it wasn’t spoken out loud.
Is this a typical Protestant hymn? Or just among the more evangelical-ish branches of Christianity that aren’t Catholic? What makes it especially worrisome? Is it about God being “in me”?
Oh, watching a Catholic mass is not better.
It’s a mainline protestant church. Progressive socially. It’s not especially worrisome, that’s why it’s worrisome.
It’s not a hymn I’m personally familiar with, and looking it up it does seem to be a fairly recent (1980’s) non-denominational song, so yeah, more likely something you’d see in an evangelical service than a mainline Protestant church. That being said, it’s not particularly out there as far as the theme of hymns go.
There is definitely a theme of submission to God in a lot of Christian music. Part of this can sort of be accounted for the fact that theology would imply that God should be a source of strength and guidance for us in our darkest hours, that he might be trusted to show us the right way to do things. However there is a difference between the empowering aspects of devotion and the surrendering aspects of devotion. God giving us guidance that we might be able to make the right decision is different from trusting that God will take care of all of our problems, and the latter can get messy if certain people can encourage others to see them as a proxy for God in those circumstances. When we trust a church to help us know what God wants from us, we end up trusting that church to make our decisions for us.
And of course, from an outsider’s perspectives, there can be something troubling about the encompassing submission that is implied in devotion. Walky sees a cult because he sees people singing about giving themselves fully over to God, and yeah, generally speaking whenever you see a crowd of people chanting that they’ll give themselves fully over to a single guy, the natural inclination is to start looking out for koolaid. Sometimes that get obscured under all the tradition.
I would like to make a futile attempt to rescue a word from corruption, by saying that as a mainline Protestant I take exception to using “evangelical” to mean “in-your-face, turn or burn” as opposed to the obvious meaning of “euangelion”: “good news”.
OK, I failed, rant ends.
I heard it in evangelical churches when I was younger. There’s a lot of songs in those types of churches about how basically you can do nothing on your own, you’re worthless and messed up by sin and everything good about you isn’t because of you it’s because of god. But of course all your mistakes are yours, not gods.
As a brit I found this hymn pretty wild to read. We don’t really sing stuff like that here (as far I know). It is very “god is everything, without god I suck”. Here it’s like “isn’t nature nice, thanks god” (as far as I know, British ppl tend to be more culturally Christian than religious per se).
Nope, sorry Walky. That’s normal christianity and normal christian worship music (yes it’s f***ed up, but so is Christianity).
Whether or not she’s in a cult has to do with how much power the group and its leaders have over her. You may find the B.I.T.E. model useful for evaluating that.
well, she seems to be a bit more well adjusted than joyce, so i’m assuming if she decided to be agnostic or full on atheist i’d think her parents would accept it (tho be a hilarious plot twist if it was literally only her as the ‘religious’ person in the family
but i suppose religious differences would be a valid reason as any to have a breakup
I don’t think Walky legitimately thinks she’s in a cult. He’s overstating because he’s concerned by some of the lyrics. Although…. “That’s normal Christianity” and “that’s a cult” are not mutually exclusive.
Also, and I feel like this is important to point out, he’s not saying it out loud.
Reminds me of the time I went to church and they were singing a song about how they wanted to feel Jesus inside them. It was one of those mega churches and that line was sandwiched between two other equally dirty sounding ones and I started laughing in the middle of trying to sing, causing more than a few angry glares. Then the church announced that every household had to pay $500 (minimum, more members meant more money) and I immediately nope’d out. My ex was livid, but I can recognize a cult when I see one!
This is definitely not great for Walky and Lucy though. She’s not exactly like Joyce, I can’t see her going through a “losing/cooling my faith” story. And likewise, I can’t see him *not* being bothered by this (meaning his personality doesn’t strike me as the sort that wouldn’t constantly make little comments about her beliefs that eventually wear her down even if it’s unintentional). It’s one of those foundational issues; if you have certain personalities you can make it work, but more often than not it becomes a game of “death by one thousand cuts.”
Could be wrong though. My husband and I managed to make it work by being respectful of each others beliefs (until I lost mine, that is), and Walky seems determined to do things “right”. This is another issue which can be solved by simple communication, which maybe he’ll do in the next few strips. I’m just really worried this will be another thing he throws in the pressure cooker of his brain to not bring up until the worst possible moment. Like, other than the fact that she likes comics and games like him, it kinda feels like he dislikes most things about her from her religious beliefs to her always-on attitude to how she wants to be more physically intimate sooner than he’s ready for. And like, not that I’d expect him to be chill about religion (he’s never shown an interest in it before), it’s just that… these lyrics aren’t that bad. Nothing extreme about it other than it probably sounding awful musically. If these lyrics are freaking him out, he ain’t gonna make it through the “this is literally the body and blood of Christ” part. Idk if most Protestant denominations believe it literally is, but it threw me for a hard loop when I found out that my Orthodox relatives believe it literally turns into flesh and blood after you eat it.
TL;DR, my prediction for the next few strips: “Oh no!”
Gonna add here that I don’t know which song this one is, so I’m only going off of the lyrics in the comic. I actively avoided gospel music even as a Christian, it is literally the worst-sounding genre in the world to my ears.
All that with your ex-husband sounds awful, I’m really sorry.
PS. I was also a little shocked when I learned about transubstantiation – my church always seemed treat that part Jesus’s speech at the last super as metaphor and the communion as a ritual for the sake of remembrance. It was just really mouth-watering delicious bread and a quantity of grape juice too small to quench one’s thirst. I don’t think I’d want to cannibalize Jesus.
Thankfully he was only my ex-boyfriend, my husband is my only one (and hopefully it will continue that way!)
I suspect I was a bit like Walky’s family was, if they identify as Christians. My mother occasionally took us to church but without any schedule (she left it up to me as a child, which meant we didn’t go because I woke up before 7 am for nobody but school). I was a Christian for 22 years, I was baptized, but I never once took communion. I didn’t even know Protestants did communion until reading this comic. I had to call a relative like “WAIT ALL SECTS DO COMMUNION?! SINCE WHEN????” So I had *heard* of transubstantiation but I always reasoned it was a form of sympathetic magic, not literal.
The Episcopal Church is a Protestant church that split off from Rome when the Pope on the behest of the King of Spain wouldn’t grant Henry VIII a divorce so he could remarry and thus hopefully have a son and thus uncontested heir. Some parishes do communion once a month. Some do it 2x a month. Some do it every Sunday.
The knots that theologians twist themselves into over this detail is something I find hilarious, personally. They feel so compelled to be utterly literalist about it and do not know how to deal with the consequences. You did this to yourselves, guys.
FWIW I’m pretty sure transubstantiation is a catholic/orthodox theology that most if not all protestant denominations discarded, that’s definitely been my experience.
Consubstantiation! *laughs in Lutheran*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L3DnbeWWbg&pp=ygUUamVzdXMgaW5zaWRlIGNhcnRtYW4%3D Gotta want to please jesus (south park cilp)
I had a similar experience when my grandparents dragged me to church for Christmas and the priest mentioned in passing that Maria was 12 when giving birth… I was just sitting there like D: for a while. Like, even if you believe the whole thing, how is your reaction to worship that God?
Fun fact: her age is nowhere in the Bible.
Various comments:
Uh, food does turn into flesh and blood after you eat it. Does that help any?
Musically this one is not so bad. There are recent songs that show a real talent for amusicality, seemingly assembled at random from a Universal Religious Buzz Phrase Generator, hammered onto tunes that don’t fit the words and would stumble even without them.
This song must be a parody, right? It’s so empty-headed and vacuous in its promise of blind obedience. Apparently it’s fun to sing I guess.
Christian music genuinely might be unparodiable.
Apparently it’s a real song people sing in earnest.
Rich Mullins, who Joyce has mentioned several times over the years, wrote a tune called “Awesome God.” The chorus includes the line “Our God is an awesome god.”
I mostly associate that song with a guy called Kenny from a video game called The Walking Dead. If you don’t know why, look up “Kenny Awesome God” and you’ll probably find out.
I’ve seen that one. XD
There’s a song about how you’d cry like Jesus if nobody liked you, either.
It’s 10000000% on-point.
Any religion is a cult at some point
A [simplified] measure of how much cult a religion is, is how much of your personal life/time/money it demands.
Carol’s church has not been shown to be an outlier, just a bit extreme.
Until shown otherwise, I’m assuming all of the churches in the area are cult-y.
It’s the midwest. This is the region of America that put up a big HELL IS REAL sign 30 minutes from a major city and it’s not even weird.
It’s interesting as in many ways it’s about culture and tradition. Like I had a friend who wouldn’t allow “religious items” in the house but that include my penguin Xmas ornaments that were an allusion to the 3 wise men (literally penguins in cracker hats).
A lot of art and culture is heavily influenced by religion. And I think that can be cool, interesting and beautiful. I also think culturally religion often provides the baseline for social morals (like its usually how kids learn about morality as a concept to start with).
So yes I think too often organised religion is too authoritarian and doesn’t allow discussion or different interpretations, but that’s not always true. And it’s so foundational to many cultures where individuals do have different interpretations or follow traditions becuase they simply like them that to say religion = cult is too simplistic.
I mean…I dunno. I’m fine with people finding hope, meaning, inspiration and purpose in their religion. If they truly believe their life, hope and strength are in God then more power to ’em. A lotta people find comfort in believing that there’s a higher power and that adoration drives them through their day to day life and I feel like just because I don’t believe in that doesn’t give me the right to criticize that. If “It’s all part of god’s plan” helps you cope with loss or misfortune, I envy that.
I don’t generally, but lines like that are disconcerting to me and it would be regardless of what they were talking about. Especially since they’re probably making kids sing it.
yeah i def see the appeal of having religion as a ‘comfort/strength’ as opposed to “i shall pray for a hundred million bucks and not work toward it at all” as a way (tho i think one podcaste ri listened to joked about growing up catholic and saying something liek “it’s all good i’ll just ask god to forgive me before i die”
as long as they aren’t using a religious excuse to hurt someone, just let ppl believe what they want, even if ppl have valid reasons to criticize, it would be kinda a dick move to just go into a church and yell hail satan loudly (tho i wonder how many like 11 year olds have tried doing that to get out of going to church XD [i mean, picking fights is shitty to begin with but it’s kinda interesting how those same ppl only seem to be anti christian and don’t also tell like a woman wearing a hijab to remove it, not that they should either way but i wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s an asshole to everyone about it no matter how ‘deep’ their belief is])
The topic of religion in itself is complicated and difficult, mainly about “saviors” who know that many people go through bitter times and seek comfort and help and take advantage of it, giving a promise of something better for something in return.
It is from that that many people see religions as something harmful, but I dare say it, you can find something wise and redeemable in the Bible, for example.
Some of that making them feel better depends on making them feel like shit first. Some pretty messed up stuff follows from “it’s all part of [god(s)]’s plan”, and it’s everyone’s right to criticize that.
I know as long as there’s humans, a lot of them will be religious. A mix of somewhat comforting ——, neutral silliness, and harmful in each of them, effecting people’s choices large and small. Religions aren’t the only beliefs and practices that do those things. It’s mostly fine, are at least mostly something I accept it’s not worth trying to change. But when it’s harmful, exercise your right to criticize it.
Why is it their right to share what they find comforting, but I find cruel, but not my right to share why I find comforting and they find unsettling?
“God will SAVE you… from the eternal torment we made up but attribute to him”
We made him sound like more of a c-word so we could make him sound like less of one for not letting you go to the place that he was a c-word for making in the first place.
“Thank you God, for not torturing me! I love you!”
All the really successful religions run a spiritual protection racket
It’s not just Christianity. For example, thinking that bad things happen to Dalits because they deserve it comes from the same type of reasoning as “it’s part of [gods]’ plan”.
It’s like the part where Joyce says all her strength comes from God, and Dorothy is sad that Joyce doesn’t realize her strength comes from herself.
Thank you.
And that was My Life is in You, Lord
…do you wanna visit an Episcopalian church instead, Walkerton?
Wow, it’s worse than I thought. Not hard to remember the words though.
religions are just cults that grew too large
In a sense, very much yeah. One of Christianity’s big innovations was the idea of a canonical doctrine agreed upon regardless of geography. It wasn’t successful, but they put a lot of effort during multiple periods of its history into enforcing it. Which, of course, also made it incredibly inflexible when it spread to other places.
But cultures shouldn’t be inflexible, and they shouldn’t be universal.
and tax free, surprised more ppl aren’t making up organizations to get a break or so
i’d expect to see more ppl demand to see miracles as proof, but be amusing of ‘modern demons’ existed but i imagine they’d mess with ppl more than help
Speaking as a rather shaky materialist with undefined pagan/animist leanings, I’m going to say I don’t fucks with this take. It’s not “religion” or “organized religion” or whatever other pretty term you wanna use. The problem is Christianity. This goes beyond theological issues (not a fan of how much genocide plays a foundational role in the mythology, such as the battle of Jericho, nor am I thrilled with how much the belief system hinges on the apocalypse theology in Revelations, this latter element IMO having formed the basis for a lot of the more fucked up shit done in Christ’s name) and into the cultural aspects of it. Imperialism and colonialism are baked into Christianity. “Spreading the Good News” is considered a major tenet of the faith, and that’s served as a basis for everything from forced conversions to slavery.
Do other belief systems, especially the big ones, have some fucked up elements? Indeed they do. But Christianity began life as an apocalypse cult that believed the end of the world was imminent. Add to that Roman Imperial doctrine and you have a recipe for a fast-spreading belief system that has no tolerance for competitors, especially the much older pagan beliefs that it (in many cases violently) replaces.
“Christianity is uniquely bad” is some ‘noble savage’ BS. You might not want to use the terms “religion” or “organized religion”, but don’t tell other people they don’t want to.
I get that you have objections to what I said, I just don’t understand how you got those specific objections from what I said.
‘It’s not “religion” or “organized religion” or whatever other pretty term you wanna use.’
glad I could help
You didn’t, though. What exactly is the issue?
don’t tell people what they fucking “wanna” say. if someone is criticizing all religion, that’s what they’re doing. if you want to get all “noble savage” then that’s what you can do yourself. if you want to play obtuse, do that too.
Jesus you really misread the entirety of my comment. I don’t even know where you got “noble savage” from — I notice you haven’t bothered to explain that one yet either.
Actually no, I’m not gonna sit around waiting for you to explain. I really shouldn’t engage with you anymore, since you’re hella mad about hella nothing, but let’s set the record straight
A) you seem to think that I’m somehow trying to force people to use or not use certain words, and I am not, you seem to have (deliberately?) misread the meaning of what I said, when I said “it’s not “religion” or “organized religion”” I wasn’t saying they weren’t allowed to use those words, I was saying that the target of their ire is misplaced
2) “if someone is criticising all religion, that’s what they’re doing” — oh my god no shit? I was disagreeing with them
D) “noble savage” is a racist trope about indigenous people and I have zero idea what that has to do with anything in this thread
have a good rest of your night.
Religions are just what people believe.
Not in the supernatural.
Period.
Yeah, I’ve been in Walkys shoes.
Went to my friend’s church when I was a kid cause his dad made him go, so I tagged along to keep him company, and was strongly turned off by the messaging. It always boiled down to some variation of God loves you as a long as you do what he wants.
And I couldn’t stomach that sort of conditional love.
god sure is petty lol. tho given how the bible was ‘written by’ humans i’m surprised they didn’t sneak in a way to be like “don’t question the priests/church leaders” or so, to where ppl are even more under their control
I mean there is the pope but i wonder how many ppl do put him on the same amount of reverence as jesus lol (tho honestly my first thought is ‘popemobile’ and ‘matpat giving the pope undertale’ lol)
🙂 don’t question the priests? what about the high priest making a golden calf and a few days latter killing 1300 people for the sin of worshiping the very same golden calf. Also, the whole tribe that did the killings became the clergy from then on. And the golden calf’s high priest got the blessings from the prophet. Also a few years latter some among the clergy tribe complained that the sons of the high priest were getting too big a cut of the meats and offerings and… got burned to death and their families were “swallowed by the earth… Yeah… go question this church leaders… and if you happen to die the next day by the hand of you know who, its just because of your wicked sins or the sins of your grandfather or his grandfather…or his grandfather’s grandfather… because you know… fear of god is the beginnig of wisdom and all that jazz. So be fearful, be very very fearful… of the hands of god…
That would be Judaism, not Christianity. Same God, but a far different attitude towards that kind of thing.
No no, he loves you even when he casts you to eternal torment, he’s just got to hurt you for not obeying him. Forever.
tbf the fun orgy kind prolly has some dark undertones to them too ,if not hte ‘leader’ just scamming their money (in which case be bettr to go off to a brothel)
I was looking in my memory for a cult in which orgies are not reserved only for the leader and perhaps the narrowest circle of priests.
Maybe a hippie commune?
lol i think there was a Ghosts (the cbs/american adaptation) of something like that but yeah all the girls did focus on the leader
but wouldn’t be surprised if t was some prostitution ring that /called/ it self a ‘cult’/organized community so it wouldn’t be illegal or so
There is no “fun orgy kind” of cult. Cults are defined by their overly controlling structure. People doing fun orgy stuff together without being manipulated into staying in the group and following the group’s rules would, by definition, not be a cult. That’s just people doing stuff.
Yeah, I wasn’t going to call that out, since it’s a throwaway line, but orgy + cult = sexual abuse in my mind (and generally reality).
Funny how many cults that pop up turn into the male leader needing to have multiple female sexual partners, who may or may not be adults, isn’t it. -_-
it’s okay, Walky – so is Dina’s girlfriend
–Dave, just smile and nod until it’s over, and pass the plate right along when it gets to you
Dina seems pretty reasonable/tolerable of it to where she’d respect it/not try to convert becky against it even if she does also prefer science, but i’d assume at least this specific church Becky/Lucy are going to wouldn’t condone/encourage /help out the actions that Ross took
Dina might be less tolerant of it were she here listening.
I can picture the exact face she would make.
Walky and Dina would be pulling off some Olympic-level synchronized grimacing if she was here.
i guess its’ good if you can keep your romantic life and religious beliefs separate b/c i’m sure becky would not want to try to drag dina here, but she’d prolly be overjoyed if she did somehow convert
Yeah, sometimes separate interests should be separate with couples.
Crucially, Becky genuinely believes in science, which is the big sticking point for Dina; her partner being atheist isn’t important to her, and their being religious doesn’t deeply bother her; she primarily cares whether or not you’re the type of religious person who ignores objective reality.
If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my pastor
The creepy if all: in some communities, it’s really true. 😮
He seems to be having a bad time.
other htan being happy that his gf’s happy i cna’t ever picture walky having a /good/ time in church
Hey, real question(s) though? How do newcomers know if they’re singing the song right? What if they don’t know how to read music? What if they can read the words on the paper but don’t know the tune? Is it considered rude not to know the words/tune if you’re attending? Is it ruder not to sing at all? Will you be singled out for singing incorrectly? Are there consequences? Like real ones, not just somebody’s aunt frowning and writing a mean fanfic about you. If I walk into a church next… whenever you people have your gatherings (Sunday morning?) and everyone is singing and I don’t know the song, what’s the generally acceptable thing to do in that scenario? I’m not actually going, but if I did?
And don’t give me any of that “depends on the church/denomination” shit, that’s a copout for people who don’t have a real answer. I know things depends on stuff, but is it remotely possible to answer any of those questions in a normal way?
Don’t sing at first (or mouth along silently), listen to the melody, which for group singing won’t be doing anything too fancy, and come in when you feel you’ve picked up. No music reading required.
They don’t give you sheet music to these songs (they would for old hymns, but not the poppy worship music), you’re just expected to know them and read the lyrics off a projector screen. Not knowing them is a faux pas akin to not knowing whatever popular songs are currently on the radio because the only reason you wouldn’t know them was if you listened to secular music instead, which is Bad.
To date myself, I was once told I was going to hell for listening to Katy Perry by a youth minister, and I was just… so confused.
I really don’t care if people consider me uncultured, because I know I’m differently cultured. Again, I’m not singing for them.
i’m just picturing snarky teens butchering it on purpose but i imagine it’s not rly ‘required’ the same way churches have their own choirs but not everyone’s a singer so i imagine ppl can just quietly and respectfully listen since im sure there are older christian uptight ladies that’d look down on you if you got the song right but horribly off key lol
I went to a Catholic school as an atheist with atheist friends, and I can absolutely promise you that we did butcher these songs, but not in the sense of singing the tune wrong. Because we were #edgy, we replaced the lyrics with “Satanic” versions. Never got caught.
in a Catholic church, usually a priest or an organist/pianist sets the rhythm of a given song and sings the verses and chorus, and the faithful sing only the chorus, which is easy to follow and sometimes the text is displayed on the screen next to the altar. Due to the fact that the organist sings through loudspeakers, it is easy for the faithful to avoid singing. Plus there is even a parable that God is more pleased with the singing of the faithful who are deaf to the tone than the singing of an unfaithful singer.
and now, since i’m nearly this many ||||| | decades old, I’m frowning in confusion at the juxtaposition of “Catholic church” and “screen next to the altar”
–Dave, and then I am reminded that that was prooobably one in the USA somewhere
ps: I am very familiar with ‘screen next to / above / totally oversized compared to altar’ but that was in fundamentalist churches here in knoxville or nearby which other members of my quartet attend so that we’ve also sung there a few times ourselves
Is not required, but the ministry will spot you, not singing, and “passive-agressively” will tell church they will sing the song again, because they felt didn’t sing it with all their soul.
Or people are refraining because sins, of fear from take another step towards God. Something like that.
Did that seriously happen? Man, the stories here are sometimes so far removed from my own church experiences that I can’t help but wonder if some people are making them up.
It’s hard to believe because it’s all, often, so subtle to get attention for who is outside.
Ex Church of Scotland answer:
None of our hymn books had sheet music, but there was a choir who sang in front of a microphone and the gist is that you could follow their lead. A lot of the songs have the same tune as other well-known folks songs because that’s often what folks songs did: take the church music, that “everyone” knew (at the time) and add different lyrics. So that can help, too.
There’s also the more pop/rock stuff we had once a month. Some of that was projected above the pulpit with a sort of (Disney deep dig here) “if you want to sing along, follow the bouncing ball” thing going on.
Also like someone else above said yeah, often whoever was playing the music on the organ/keyboard etc would play the verse before people joined in, so you can hear the tune.
Forgot to answer the second half of the question but, I went to a pretty casual set of churches and generally speaking if you couldn’t follow along (for whatever reason) you just stood up and smiled with everybody else and then sat down at the end and it was all good.
“the church music, that “everyone” knew (at the time) and add different lyrics”
Historian and musician here. With protestant church music, it was often the other way around – folk tunes were adapted into church music. Luther was a pioneer in pilfering good tunes for ecclesiastical purposes.
I know later on in the US that the Union movement took the church tunes because they were pretty and folks knew them and changed the lyrics so they made sense.:)
Ooh, thanks for letting me know I had it back to front! How fascinating.
Deep Disney dig? I remember that from watching Mitch Miller when I was a kid.
I’ve only ever been to church services tied to weddings and funerals, which tend to have a fixed agenda, so it was relatively easy to fly under the radar by just sitting, standing, and kneeling whenever everyone else did. “Caring whether everyone sang well enough” was never on the itinerary.
The other thing with weddings and funerals is that it is expected that people who are not members of that denomination or are not regular church goers will be in attendance so no one expects everyone to be familiar with what’s going on.
The variety of answers probably tells you that it really does depend on the church.
For my experience with a single church which I went to for a very brief time… well, nobody would even notice if you were quietly going “maaaamaaamaaa” while everyone else sang. Maybe the people next to you, if you weren’t quiet enough. So faking you knowing the song would be highly unlikely to be noticed and if it was nobody there would care.
You could sit it out and you’d probably get a well-meaning comment at the end of “are you okay dear, I noticed you weren’t singing” but from my (again, very limited) experience any answer other than “it all sucks anyway” or similar would be treated with a measure of respect and probably encouragement to not be shy when you’re ready.
From the other comments it seems my experience was an unusual one.
Note that by “sit it out” I mean sitting it out entirely. Everyone else standing to sing but sitting and not. I did do that on more than one occasion and it was noticed, but not treated as a big deal.
Exvangelical from less culty but pretty culturally conservative denominations: Over the last couple of decades there’s been a pretty significant shift here noticeable at an individual church level that’s been pretty consistent at any church in my part of the world: people singing along are now in the minority. The modern praise and worship songs are written to be performed on a stage rather sung as a group like traditional hymns were, so probably about 50% of people just listen to the band, 25% kind of mumble under their breath, and 25% actually sing. Percentages vary depending on the exact denomination and the local church culture, but it’s generally within that sort of ballpark I’d say.
Older songs would be designed more to be easy to pick up, and when I was a kid most people (but still not all) sang along. The band still usually plays through the first verse instrumentally first to give everyone a chance to pick up the tune, and then if it was an unfamiliar song you’d often just listen for the first verse and chorus before joining in for the rest of the song which would just repeat that pattern. Nowadays though there are a lot more vocal flourishes and variations throughout the song that will trip you up if you don’t already know it though, and a lot of songs require better vocal technique and broader range than most untrained singers are capable of, which is I think why most people kinda just gave up (and we’re just culturally not as used to singing recreationally as we used to be).
This is something I used to care about and was a real bugbear of mine back when I was still invested in my local church. Weird to think of how unimportant and irrelevant it seems to me now.
Listen to the joyful noise that comes out of some people who know the words and the tune by heart, and you will feel more confident. Just do your best — it’s not for your neighbor anyway.
stand up and sit down when everyone else does. you don’t have to sing or say anything. you don’t have to bow your head in prayer, but if they join hands, you’ll have to do that. you don’t have to put money in the basket.
don’t take communion if they have it.
They may have a greeting ritual, done in the middle of the service, called (it was called “passing of the peace” in our bulletins. There’s a short script, we shook hands with everyone around us and said “peace be with you” or responded “and also with you”)
If you do want to sing along, the words may be in the bulletin or in a hymnal, and you don’t have to worry about being in tune, most of the congregants probably don’t know how to sing either.
I’m an Episcopalian. We’re a Protestant denomination but with separate origins from the Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists or any of the various Evangelical denominations. Music gets a lot of emphasis in our church.
We have a standard hymnal (the 1982 Hymnal) plus several other supplemental ones that parishes are free to use if they wish. The origins of the tunes are all over the map. Some are old folk songs or secular songs that were given religious texts. Some (especially in the supplemental ones) are more contemporary or have non-European origins. There’s also some that are from Bach, Brahms, Tallis, Palestrina, etc. A lot of them are in 4-part harmony (we don’t have a separate “choir edition”).
Episcopal churches generally DON’T have a “band”. There’s an organist, a director and a choir (the organist and director are often the same person). If the parish is wealthy the choir may be made up of trained singers that get paid, but generally they’re people from the parish. For Christmas and Easter you might hire a couple of string players, again depending on the parish’s finances. To answer your central question, the organist plays through the hymn once before everyone starts singing.
In contrast to the Roman Catholic church, just about everyone sings. If you can sing the parts, go ahead and sing the parts (but in that case you may well be approached to join the choir). If you can’t sing in tune, sing anyway. No one will get on your case about it, nor will they get on your case if you don’t sing at all.
Episcopalians sing a lot. There’s at least 4 hymns in every service. There’s also often at least one or two short prayers that get sung, and the Psalm reading is often chanted. In fact, if you really want to get into it the 1982 Hymnal has a section that gives musical settings (songs or chants) for just about every prayer in the service. My parish used to chant the Lord’s Prayer for a few years, although that’s not common. Additionally, when Communion is being distributed the choir sings an anthem, a song that is more complex to sing than the hymns and that ONLY the choir sings, the parishioners won’t have the music to do so. The choir practices for an hour to an hour and a half one weeekday evening and for 45 minutes before the service. So they all get to know each other well and are a bit of a mafia at times. They’re generally a fun group. Full disclosure; I’ve sung tenor in my church choir for years.
These aren’t complicated songs. In fact, it’s just the opposite: hymns and praise songs are written specifically to be easy for the complete novice to pick up and remember easily. Many hymns just set religious words to a familiar secular tune and called it a day. Almost every song that is sung in church will be verse, refrain, repeat as necessary, so even if you’ve never heard it before, you just have to listen to it one time through and you know how it goes. The average congregant isn’t expected to do anything fancy with harmony.
For assistance, there’s typically a leader at the front, if not a whole choir, with piano, organ, or band accompaniment. Words are in a hymnal (along with music in that case), projected on a screen, or printed in the paper bulletin.
As for “doing it wrong,” frankly you would have to mess up pretty bad for anybody to even notice. Nobody cares all that much if you’re a little off key or even skip the song entirely.
This is very funny to me, because I have literally never been to a church service – but I have sang, in a choir, but also in some assemblies like… everyone in all the schools I went to. I am surprised this is a question for anyone.
You sing it by following as best you can, it’s not rude to not know the lyrics, and you get better over time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Obviously how judgemental people might be depends on the individual church like literally any situation in which one might sing/do anything in a group for the first time.
Walky and Dina unexpectedly become close buddies.
Now that i would love. ^^
well dina did have a crush on him in one former comic /altternate universe/time line lol
Willis went straight to the point, and he knows what he talks when the subject is christianity.
That’s the one of part of nowadays I hate the most. All the worship songs, every ministry, every work of media, sound, light, harmony, everything work in one way: destroy and renegade all your life, to make you feel an useless shit, and depending your life to church.
I don’t even know if for Christ, for church, for pastor… It’s an abusive relationship and they fuck “proselite” it, calling people to join it.
Well, yeah. If you build your flock’s self-confidence they might leave.
Is Lucy wearing a cabled sweater?
I don’t think so, or if she is it’s a very unusual one (the pockets, the collar, the cut all look pretty different to most cableknit jumpers I’ve come across).
looks like a normal turtleneck to me, well teh ‘turtleneck’ area might be a bit thicker, and with pockets but i think willis just uses references on online sites
Welp, this oughta be interesting.
In which Walky learns how religions work
How Christianity works you mean.
Meh, if you’re not hacking group consciousness it can hardly be called a religion, then they’re just weird beliefs that you refuse to check against reality.
Walky, christian churches literally call their attendees their “flock” and “sheep”*, what did you expect? The POINT of sheep is that they’re going to be repeatedly sheared and, once they reach a certain point, killed and eaten.
*amazing how they get to say the scam out loud, and people still fall for it
Wrt sheep- actual sheep- they’ve been bred to the point where they’re dependant on us. As in they don’t shed their wool- other animals shed their fur but sheep do not. They literally need to be sheared, or it’ll just get matted and soaked and filthy and heavy and they’ll start to overheat in summer.
I’m not sure where that fits into the analogy. Perfect analogy of what is desired from the “flock” of “sheep”, I suppose? To be genuinely reliant on their “shepherd”?
What I’m hearing you say is that they created a problem that didn’t exist in the first place, and then went “the only way to make it through this is to let us exploit you.” I wonder how THAT could relate to religion.
“I’m fulfilling a need, my flock *need* to get fleeced.”
…and all of a sudden devoted literalist ministers understand it as a metaphor. A big, juicy payday of a metaphor.
I’m confused. Why are people so upset by this song? I would greatly appreciate if anyone could explain to me in a, uh, non-judgy way I guess. I sang songs like these for a long time, so it’d mean a lot to me if I’m not met with ”oh look there’s a cult member” for asking this.
The same problem as with much of Christianity, the inherent assumption that you as a person are worthless.
okay, so, culty is overstating it a bit!
probably because walky is young and likely a little skeeved by religion given the whole kidnapping incident which was 50% religiously motivated
but! people do not like being told “you only have [strength/hope/any given good quality] if you believe in this”
it comes across to many a lot like someone saying “you couldn’t cope without me” or even “you’re not worth anything without me”
these are things most people would be worried about someone saying to them, especially if that person is “in charge”
I do recognise the difference between a hymn and a partner/boss/parent saying some fucked up shit, but these things certainly seem to rhyme if you have reason to look for it
So, that’s my perspective on it
(as an aside one could potentially draw a line between walky’s mother’s behaviour and this. I don’t really have enough data to be conclusive there but I think she certainly acts like “you’re smart/good/perfect so long as you do what I say/don’t hang out with hoodlums/never disappoint me”)
It’s that the song (and others you’re familiar with I’m sure, because I used to sing a lot along this vein when I went to church) give all your good things, “the glory” of everything you’ve ever done to god, insinuating you are worthless without his divine intervention. But of course you own all the sin and mistakes. It takes away a lot of your personal agency and diminishes your own accomplishments and achievements in life. If you succeed, it’s because of divine intervention/his grace. If you fail, it’s not because he withheld grace though, it’s because you messed up and need to grovel for forgiveness. Also, hugs, I know reflecting on this stuff is hard, especially when you’ve been raised with it.
Here is my perspective as a total outsider (I’m Jewish (and atheist, but that bit isn’t important here))
I have never heard this song before. To me it comes off as very creepy that they are singing like their whole personality comes from God. Like they are just puppets that God acts through. And they don’t seem to mind.
For comparison, there weren’t that many English songs in Synagogue services (mostly we just sang the prayers themselves, and in Hebrew, not English) but there is one English song I remember, and here are the lyrics:
Oh Lord, my God
I pray that these things never end
The sand and the sea
The rush of the waters
The crash of the heavens
The prayer of the heart
It is different in that is counts God as responsible for natural phenomena, and hopes that the singer maintains a connection with God, but does not imply that the singer is entirely… A stand-in for God without free will of their own.
I’m with you here. This song is basically about leadership. Like most social structures, leadership and being led can become diseased, but it’s not necessary or inevitable.
Nothing about the lyrics in the comic says ‘leadership’ to me, certainly not _good_ leadership. They say ‘dependency’ and ‘fluffing the leaders’s ego’.
Taking away all of your success and happiness and assigning it to someone else whilst making you own an your failures and everything you don’t like about yourself is a form of coercive control. You’re worthless without me so don’t even think about how messed up this relationship is. I didn’t get assaulted by this particular hymn during the daily services of my decade in religious boarding school, but I did get another very similar one:
“When I survey the wondrous cross / on which the probe of glory died / my richest gain I count but loss / and pour contempt on all my pride.”
On a related note one of my close family members tried to have the priest justify Ephesians 5:22+ at her wedding. The one which would have the wife obey the husband in all things, but so long as the husband loves his wife it’s all good. And I’m just like o_0. Do neither of you realise how awful that is?
Basically, it comes across in the same way the pamphlet I got from a random guy in the street about Christianity did: passive aggressively judgemental and like you’re not really a good or valuable person on your own, you’re just one of God’s puppets who can’t do anything right alone.
And while I do think religion can have benefits, that is only so if expressed in a balanced, measured and reasonable way.
And like yeah, this is just a song at the end of the day, but religion is supposed to direct how you live your life and make decisions, so it should have some accountability for the messages it expresses.
Thank you everyone so much for taking the time and having the patience to explain this to me!! <3<3
This is very interesting, I think my ADHD might have actually saved me from the whole context? Both now and when I was in church as a teen.
I’ve always attributed certain words to very specific concepts which means
A) I tend to sound pretentious because I only use the ONE WORD I feel is perfect for the situation, and
B) I have trouble communicating with others because they’ll use other words, which means I read a whole bunch of subtext into it, which leads to misunderstandings and makes us all frustrated, and
C) I often misinterpret written text.
So to ME, text like in this song would mean something like
”I put faith and hope in many things, one of which is God. I find strength in God to supplement my own strength. God is a nice thing to have in my already rich and established personality.”
Which is funny, cause now I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to be interpreted, but I think it’s a better interpretation, and it certainly saved me from yet another teenage crisis..!
As someone who used to go to a Catholic church: dang, they were chill and free and non-depressing compared to this.
vastly depends on the specific parish and, to a greater extent, your family though
like, father frank who does an absolutely minimal sermon because he has to do three more masses today and would really like to catch the game is a bit different than the lads in the big church up the town ensuring it goes on for at least an hour and is at least 50% in latin
And they both pay money and homage to the fucker who leads a pedophile ring and calls transfolk “nuclear weapons against the plan of god”, so is there really a meaningful difference?
In terms of the literal experience of the service? Yes, very much so
In terms of the organisation they support? Of course not
I think it’s very clear in what context I was speaking
There’s a phenomenon I’m seeing lately, in some bigger US cities, of schismatic Catholic churches going the OTHER way than usual — “We’re keeping the services the way you like them, but we aren’t paying dues or lip service to the Pope until he cleans up the pedo rings and starts accepting LGBTQ identities as 100% valid, and also abortion is okay.”
Highly recommended if you really still need some ritualized Jesus in your life but you hate the modern right wing.
There are also Catholic bishops in the US pissed at the Pope for being to liberal and open.
There may be an American antipope in our lifetimes.
If an antipope touches a pope, do they cataclismically explode?
no, but wars _do_ break out
–Dave, unless of course they touch the right spot on the doll
Ok, but then they’re not, by definition, catholic. “The Pope says what” is one of the prime tenets of catholicism. Like, if the pope says, as he does, that abortions are againt the will of god, then that’s a matter of doctrine, and the pope is infallible in terms of catholic doctrine. That’s part of the mandatory rules of catholicism.
careful – infallibility in ordinary speech is emphatically NOT Catholic dogma for him. the doctrine’s been invoked like somewhere between one and three times total? one of which I think was over Mary, the GodMom, being born without original sin.
when the Pope’s talking or issuing papal bull or whatever he’s no more infallible than anyone else, he has to specifically invoke it and it’s a Big thing and these days would literally make headlines worldwide.
–Dave, Catholic fan headcanon has some odd stuff in it
Papal statements are not infallible unless he says he’s speaking ex cathedra. Otherwise they are guidance to the faithful but are subject to revision if he or one of his successors so chooses.
And there’s a reason for that hesitancy in invoking infallibility, and it becomes apparent when you consider what happens if a new infallible statement contradicts any old infallible statement. Infallibility allows no refutation, every single infallible statement made throughput history has to align — one single contradiction is an immediate game over.
Far from allowing Popes some OP ability to say what they want and have it accepted as truth, infallibility walls them in, progressively limiting what they’re able to say. A wise pope will make as few officially infallible statements as possible during their reign.
An even wiser pope will get a fucking job.
Maybe I should become Catholic — I need to brush up my Latin.
Has Walky always dropped the Gs at the end of words? I thought that was more of a Sal thing. And it’s interesting that he’s talking more like Sal as he starts to understand what she went through at boarding school.
Been there, Walky. She’s a good kid who is warm for your form, but you’ve got to decide if you can deal with her faith, and she’s got to decide if she can deal with your lack of one.
At least yours was honest about it and took you to a church. Mine invited me to a ‘youth club’ while rubbing up against me, robbing my brain of needed blood.
My first indication of failure was the old guy at the entrance of the pizza place who thanked her for finding the new ‘convert’ before asking me if I was ready ‘to give my life to the Lord’.
My answer of “ha! Yeah, fuck no.” was not appreciated and earned me the classic ‘You should go, but we will pray for you.’
So, no ‘youth club’ pizza for me.
Sounds like the pizza was a bigger loss than the girl.
There’s no middle ground really when you come to think about the fundamentals (no pun intended).
Either God actually is the source of everything good, like the Light Side of the Force and you are enjoying a relationship with it.
Or God doesn’t exist and any time and effort devoted to praising the entity is a waste of time, effort, and space.
There’s no “God is a minor thing you just ignore” if you have any sincerity about the thing. Ironically, unless God is something that you just use as a prop in your life to prop up your existing prejudices.
When you think of most religions… God(s) were something to be feared and you didn’t want them to notice you.
Oddly enough “God” seems to agree with the prejudices of fundamentalists, rather than making them “not judge”, “not hoard wealth” etc.
And no matter how much you wave in the direction of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a good number of them think deeds don’t matter.
Jesus would be arrested today by fundamentalists as a dirty anarchist hippie.
Fundamentalists don’t have the power to arrest people.
They do if they’re wearing badges.
A button that says “save it until marriage” doesn’t count.
sheriff’s department filled with adamant secularists where you live?
I wouldn’t know, I haven’t interacted with a cop in like ten years.
The Speaker of the House is KIND OF a big argument against what you’re saying.
I don’t know what this means.
That a bunch of religious fanatics are, in fact, determining the law of the land and arresting people over it.
See, say, abortion.
No, I mean I don’t know what a “Speaker of the House” is. I’m aware that freaks are in charge of everything, but my original comment was more about fundamentalism itself not giving somebody the power to arrest somebody else. I guess I should have phrased it closer to that, but whatever.
The head of the US House of Representatives. Selected nominally by vote of the whole House, but practically by the majority party. Currently one Mike Johnson, who’s an ultraconservative Christian and a real piece of work.
“There’s no middle ground really when you come to think about the fundamentals (no pun intended).”
If we’re talking the full range of ideas of ‘God’, there is, really. Like the Deist God who started up the universe but doesn’t interfere. You can have a God who created the universe but doesn’t know what will happen and wants to find out. There’s process theology stuff where God is also growing over time.
And “source of everything good” is a weird idea. It’s not like God created Dumbing of Age, say. “Ah, but God created _everything_”. Well, then he created everything _bad_ too…
You could have gods whose name isn’t God, which you should not capitalize if you’re not using it as a name. You could have any of the countless ways a deist god or gods could be imagined, not just “the Deist God”.
You can have multiple gods within one cosmology, you could have infinite gods within one cosmology. Multiple gods who disagree, the things that please them in opposition to each other. Or god(s) who becomes pettier over time. A god who is a cosmic platonic ideal beetle, and they didn’t create beetles or the universe willfully, but the universe emanated from them and moved along the path that would reflect the cosmic beetle the best by having the most beetles in it, and humans are just a side-effect.
Dumbing of Age book 14: My girlfriend is in a cult, and not the fun orgy kind
I think we have a winner, folks.
The cover of Walky cringing/internally-screaming in a church is used as a reaction image for years to come.
Probably what Martin Luther said too.
David is entirely correct. For some reason we treat the big cults differently than the small ones.
I thought Walky had been to church in the south. I’m confused at his surprise.
Oh Walky. The sex orgy cults all end in mass suicides. If Lucy and Becky are okay with this congregation, I think he can handle it. Charles puts up with Linda, so this seems much easier.
Try the Episcopal Church. You get to sing Bach cantatas and such. No drums or guitars, either.
Is it better to not have modern instruments or a rhythm section? I don’t understand.
They only use theramins because Henry VIII was a theramin enthusiast.
What I’m hearing in the comments on here is that in churches with a band the band performs the music and the people mostly listen. Worship is something you do. What I’m hearing here is that people in those churches don’t worship, they watch and listen to other people perform worship.
I recently got served a video with two Catholic priests reviewing the movie Dogma, which I thought had about a 15% chance to be funny so I watched it. Not a lot of laughs, but rather a lot of telling people you need God and He’s the only thing in the world you can rely on and Catholicism is perfect and any contradictions you see is just you misunderstanding Catholicism because no true Scotsman obviously
I thought it was judgmental and displaying a sad lack of intellectual and spiritual curiosity, but it didn’t occur to me to think it sounded like a cult. Walky might need to read up on BITE.
Badger, Irritate, Trick, Exhaust?
Well, it stands for Behavior control, Information control, Thought control and Emotional control. The “BITE model” is the most direct way I’ve seen to differentiate between cults and not cults.
Huh, so Taffy was joking but got it right anyways.
Oh yes, Kevin Smith is just confused (because plenary indulgence is actually about paying your way out of temporal punishment and doesn’t include God’s forgiveness you know) and the bits about actually believing in something being more important than the letter of the law is. . .not in fact addressed in any way.
Oops, I thought I was actually replying to CT Phipps’ comment below. No worries I think.
I get it. 🙂
Yeah, I feel like someone missed the idea of “Dogma” being bad and it being the title. Whoosh.
I should just make shit up more often. It’s had a higher success rate than being earnest.
I take it they missed the point of Dogma entirely.
Poor Walky.
Yeah, he really doesn’t seem to have understood what he was in for when he made that offer. The poor dope meant well, at least.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of religion, especially because my Grandma raised me in the summers and was very fond of her church and community.
But there are some parts of Christianity that are so insidious, and they deeply affect new believers. There’s a Hiveworks comic I deeply vibed with, Stand Still Say Silent, and you could tell by the artist’s comments that they were enjoying life, their comic, and their community. I went and checked out their more recent posts, and it was like their personality completely flipped. They spoke down about themself and their work, claiming it was no longer good because it was before they found God. Like everything before they became Christian was worthless. That THEY were worthless, because God was great. They had found religion, but it had obviously harmed them. I felt like it was so tragic.
So, all this to say, I get why Walky is so uncomfortable. I wonder if he’s going to talk with Lucy about how these lyrics made him feel, or if he’s going to joke it off.
Damn it, did they really? I’d heard they got weird about COVID, but not this part.
I feel like part of the issue is “Christianity” doesn’t tell you anything.
Who is the kind of Christian you’re referring to?
Biden, Pat Robertson, or Dolly Parton?
Seems pretty obvious, it’s the kind that encourages you to shit all over everything you’ve ever done that didn’t have some weird pervert’s personal seal of approval.
there is no functional difference between a religion and a cult
Yuh-huh, one is bigger than the other.
Also not every religion is structured like Christianity, so making these blanket statements is kinda silly.
cultishness is a measurement for a religion / religious community. They’re not all equally cultish, but none are zero.
Yeah, that’s fair.
But there’s such a huge difference between mainstream religions and serious cults that calling them the same thing really diminishes the dangers of the cults.
Mainstream religions cause problems on a societal scale, but you’re not likely to wind up drinking Kool-Aid on a compounds somewhere.
I’m agreeing with you, but I want to point out mainstream religions cause problems on a personal scale too. Obviously in different ways and/or amounts, but I was raised in a mainline protestant denomination and it fucked me up a bit.
I dunnot, that’s like saying that there’s no difference between a mom and pop corner shop and a international supermarket chain. Sure, both may abuse their staff and screw over their customers, but the first at least takes a personal interest while the latter doesn’t even name their retail-cattle before slaughtering them.
This is actually way less creepy than the Christian music at a church service I attended in college because a cute girl invited me. The band there was singing about how much we all sucked and how dependent we should be on sky-daddy to fix us.
I gritted my teeth through that, but things got REAL dramatic after the dominionist sermon. They invited congregants to come up and witness (I think that’s the right word) and when I worked my way through the line and was given a turn at the microphone… well, let’s just say I didn’t exactly win friends and influence people.
You did as Jesus would do.
Just with less whipping.
Leave out all the fun parts, why don’t you?
Careful, Walky, Christians don’t like it when that’s pointed out.
When Walky talks to Joyce about it, Joyce now knows to close the door.
but but then God comes in the window
–Dave, and what if your TEETH aren’t BRUSHED
Having escaped an actual Christian doomsday cult myself (also not the fun orgy kind), lol. Lmao.
Ooph. Wow. 8-|
Not for nothin’, but was the doomsday imminent in the “okay here’s everybody’s cup please form an orderly line for your arsenic tablet” sense, or in the “we fuckin’ swear this time guys any day now you’ll see you’ll all see” sense?
Very much the latter! Haha
Just for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events
Looks like the world’s ended 23 times already this century.
You know, that actually kind of explains a lot. If the world’s ended 23 times this century then no wonder things are so effed up.
once a year whether we need it or not
–Dave, the people in charge of printing up the bingo cards for 2024 have basically just thrown their hands up in the air and are using yarrow stalks to cast the I Ching
Yep, aaaand there’s my ol’ cult on the chart, haha.
Oof. I wanted to like Lucy with Walky. I really did. I warmed up to her as a person for a bit, but ever since they officially got together, it’s been hard slogging. She’s way too invested in things, Walky’s not invested at all, and the bulk of their interactions with other people have so far only served to highlight just how little chemistry they have. I don’t necessarily want him to get with Amber or Dorothy again, but Lucy…she’s just not the one. I give Walky credit for the growth he’s made with expressing emotions and supporting the people around him, but Lucy is just not it for him. They’re fine friends but I just can’t see this working as any kind of romantic relationship, and at this point I hope Walky sinks this ship before either of them will get hurt any worse.
Walky is me whenever I somehow find myself at a religious service these days. I’m sure to people who actually this stuff it’s comforting, but it creeps my atheist ass out.
My mum’s a high degree of catholic, and whenever she comes around singing her church’s latest hymn my head just shoots up from whatever I’m doing and I go “do you even UNDERSTAND those words you’re speaking, or do you just like the metric with that rhythm?”
Preaching and religious singing are not about words, they’re about emotions and social patterns. The preacher isn’t communicating with you, he is herding the group’s social patterns and emotions. You will see that a preacher’s sermons have a rythm and pattern to them, and that pattern is more important than the actual words. They’re basically using the tropes that the flock is familiar with to hack the collective consciousness. Their intent isn’t even bad, it’s just a completely alien form of social interaction to us atheists. We only allow marketing departments to hack our behaviour that way.
Love that analysis and the innocent twist at the end. Yep, same marketing, one wants to sell you eternal life, one wants to sell you all other products. They both want your money.
In fairness, at least on the individual preacher side (and this is in various forms of Protestantism), I have personally seen a range of motivations from, “As the person responsible for your spiritual health, I need to encourage you to give your money because I sincerely believe you will be blessed by the act of giving,” to… things that felt less sincere. E.g. bigwig members of the church’s parent organization who come to individual church events (anniversaries, etc.) to both preach and (ya know, while they’re in the neighborhood) get the congregation to give money which (at least in part) goes to them and to the pastor of the church. Maybe they are sincere in their belief that that’s truly a way for the congregants to be blessed too, and those particular churches have a tradition where the pastor and visiting pastors get a gift on anniversaries, but seeing bigwigs raise money like that always felt wayyyy sketchy from an outsider’s perspective.
I’ve also seen, “The organization needs funding to continue its work, and/or keep the lights on,” which isn’t unreasonable in itself. But, all of these things get a good deal more uncomfortable when God specifically is running the shakedown / pledge drive / (if you’re really unlucky) indulgences.
(All of which – other than the actual indulgences – are still better than “Help me buy another jet, because the one you bought me last month isn’t big enough.” But, it’s also (theoretically) not a race to the bottom.)
That’s the preachers, though. The organizations themselves, inasmuch as they want anything, definitely want your money.
(Love the analysis, too. Only thing I’d add to it is that in some more bookish Christian religious traditions, there’s a lot more communication going on, that other religious activities like Bible study may involve more actual teaching and communication than preaching itself does, and that this emotional manipulation is arguably a part of all social religious ritual to some extent. Not even in an inherently bad way: musical pieces, group cohesion and other psychological effects from singing together, exposure to beauty, all of those have an effect.)
I’m a lifelong atheist, and also spent my life avoiding or resisting marketing hacks. I won’t claim to be 100% immune, but it’s pretty hard for a paid ad to even reach me, and I do lots of evaluation of unit price or reviews checking, and avoiding impulse purchases.
For me, it’s about communing with everything. To break the chains of society and liberate your soul.
If that strikes you as exactly the opposite of what religion does, you’re speaking a different language from people in liberation theology.
This is not even among the worst worship lyrics.
This one does not directly say “i’m a terrible worm without you“, but implicitly, yeah.
I grew up with all this crap that basically kept me with god, because it implied i’d be horrible otherwise.
Turns out i’m not.
Self-confidence is only sinful because they’re scared of losing your tithes.
First time I went to Catholic service with my then-girlfriend, now wife, I had this exact thought when the priest said “and Peace be with you” and they all answered in unison.
Well, he’s not wrong…
It’s never the fun, orgy kind, unfortunately.
Yeah, at best you get to pick one. And let us be honest herein: the chances of getting even one of those are pretty horrendous.
Not even Christian, but like, I don’t get why this is BAD at all???
It’s encouraging self-abnegation and low self-worth. “All my hope is in you” is pretty creepy, even more so when the target shows no actual sign of existing.
This all seems pretty fine by me. I mean, presuming you believe that god is the embodiment of all good things, the lyrics seem pretty unobjectionable.
I have feelings about more internal monologue about church than his mom’s ultra-thinly veiled racism.
What an incredibly fitting new avatar.
Guy in the background able to hear Walky’s thoughts, and doesn’t like what he hears.
oh damn i thought i did not know this song. but i do. in german.
WHY MUST I KNOW ALL THIS STILL
It’s slowly occurring to me that the real reason I grew up with a healthy attitude on religion is because of my parents and friends, not because of the Catholic church. (Granted, I’m led to understand that the average Catholic congregation in the US is a bit more chill than the average Bible-belt nondenominational congregation these days, but still.)
Man, this really hits for me. Plus I am a brown ADHD boy so he’s already my immediate insert.